Too small for football, Jake Hockaday built himself into one of nation's best wrestlers
BROWNSBURG — Jake Hockaday figured out early on he wouldn’t be a good football player. He spent his early childhood playing the sport, but because of his small stature, he was easily pushed around.
“My whole life I was in football, but up into third grade, we realized I was gonna be pretty small,” Hockaday said. “My buddy was going to a wrestling camp, and I don't know, he just wanted me to come join. So, I tried a practice, and I loved it.”
And he never looked back.
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That early switch paid off for Hockaday, a 5-5 junior at Brownsburg, as he’s started to place his name in the IHSAA record books. Hockaday was a state champion as a freshman at 106 pounds, and followed up his first-year dominance with a state title at 120 as a sophomore.
“I love football, but there's just no way I could do that when I got older,” Hockaday said. “With wrestling, I ended up liking that more than football anyway.
“In the beginning it was just fun, it's a new thing. But as time went on, I just really liked the aspect of like, it's a team sport but it's also individual. Whatever you put in is what you get out.”
So, Hockaday makes sure to put in everything he’s got. He’s a relentless worker, putting in countless hours of work outside of Brownsburg’s wrestling room — even when his coaches encourage him to slow down.
“It's hard to be as elite as he is if you just don't have some God-given talent,” Brownsburg coach Darrick Snyder said. “Jake has phenomenal hips, and then I would say his training, it's consistency. It's 365 days a year. Our biggest issue with him is overtraining, because he's constantly doing privates and going here and getting up early in the morning, and we're like ‘Jake, sometimes you got to sleep. Sometimes you gotta let your body heal.’ But he is just constantly focused on his training.”
One way Hockaday has listened to his body is how much he’s bumped up in weight classes throughout his three years. He went up two weight classes between his freshman and sophomore seasons and bumped up two classes again, to 132 pounds, this season.
He considered going up just one weight class this year, but he didn’t want to focus his time on cutting weight — instead, he can focus on his technique.
“I got like 10 times better,” Hockaday said of bumping up his sophomore season. “So this year, I was supposed to go 126, but I was thinking that I'm already committed, I might as well just get as good as I can.”
Hockaday, FloWrestling's No. 37th-ranked recruit in the nation in the 2025 class, committed to Oklahoma on Dec. 7. He had interest from multiple programs, including Indiana, Minnesota and Wyoming, but he chose Oklahoma because of the no-nonsense culture he noticed on his official visit.
“It has the most people like me,” Hockaday said. “I know college is a lot of messing around, going to parties, but at OU, everybody's locked in. They're all just wanting to get better and have fun with wrestling.”
But before he starts college at Oklahoma, he has one more thing to accomplish at Brownsburg — become the school’s first four-time state champion. Only 11 wrestlers have won four individual state titles, according to IndianaMat.
“Jake is like the epitome of what we want our wrestlers to be, because he's a great human being and he trains really hard,” Snyder said. “He’s not real vocal, just leads by example. But he's on our wall twice, and you're only allowed to be on it four times, and no one's done it before. And we think he's got a really good shot to do it.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IHSAA wrestling: Brownsburg junior Jake Hockaday commits to Oklahoma
