STILLWATER – A.J. Ferrari is already my pick to make more than any other athlete on the Oklahoma State campus when the NCAA finally gets around to allowing the NIL (name-image-likeness) policies to go into effect. Ferrari is electric and after he won the NCAA’s 197-pound individual championship at the NCAA Wrestling Championships in St. Louis last Saturday night he was one of the top trending people on social media. Ferrari is the flexing, explosive, and dynamic wrestler and personality that at times, had Cowboys head coach John Smith scared of what he might do. Smith had already grabbed Ferrari’s head gear after his semifinal win to keep the freshman from tossing it in the air and shooting it down with “pistols firing.”
Ferrari talked about he loves those interviews after winning the NCAA and doesn’t mind that he has to try to struggle to catch his breath.
“It’s good because you let all your emotions out,” Ferrari said in his interview on Sirius-XM Radio with Big 12 This Morning. “When you on the mat in a match you have a lot of emotions in your head. I like the way they do it, the same as they do it in UFC and all the combat sports. It feels great just to represent my team and all the hard work that we’ve put in. It was a big moment and everybody was asking me for like a huge … I usually after a match do a flex or I’ll do something funny, like I’m making it rain or something hilarious, just for the fans. I did one quick flex after the match but it was so emotional.”
Ferrari also said the difference in his season was when he realized after losing a match in the Cowboy Challenge Tournament in Stillwater than wrestlers would try to steal matches from him. He caught on and realized you take it to the opponent first.
“These dudes don’t have my gas tank and at the beginning of the year I was hanging back and not really rush it,” Ferrari said. “I would get a takedown here and there, take my time. Now, it’s get on these dudes because they just want to hang back. At the beginning of the year Coach (Chris) Perry would tell me these guys will steal a match from you. Then this dude stalled his butt off and I lost to Noah Adams (West Virginia) and he stole a take down on the edge because I hesitated in my stance a little. Then he stalled the rest of the match. If you push your pace, which I can, from all positions then they can’t compete with me, which you saw last weekend.”
Now, after winning the NCAA, Ferrari gets a shot at the United State Olympic team and he is preparing to again take on much older and more experienced wrestlers. The Trials will be held at the Dickies Arena in Ft. Worth, Texas April 2-3, just down the road from Ferrari’s hometown in Allen, Texas. Listening to his typical day of preparation and you get the feeling that he has a chance.
“The first thing I do is I drink a green drink in the morning the first thing when I wake up. It’s healthy with zinc and vitamin D3,” Ferrari started. “I’ll have something to eat, healthy and not too heavy. Then I will go into a heavy lift anywhere from an hour and a half to two and a half hours. I need to put on 10-15 pounds of water weight and muscle mass in the next two weeks. I’ll lift in the morning right now.
“Then I go to classes right after that and it’s either in Zoom or in person,” Ferrari continued. “After I have two or three classes a day, each of them an hour long. After that I will take a break and eat some more. Then I will take like a 20-minute power nap. Then I go to wrestling practice. I will wrestle for a couple of hours. Then I go back and do some homework or whatever I need to do.
“Then at night I stretch or I like doing Yoga to work on my mobility,” Ferrari said in what might be a little surprising. “Everybody sees me lift but they don’t see all the stretching that I do. That is really huge to maintain the mobility while gaining the size (and strength). The weights are so different for the Olympic Trials and the NCAA. The NCAA is 197-pounds and the Olympic Trials is all the way up to 213-pounds. It is almost a 15-pound jump and for me, that is perfect because that is where I normally am most of the time.”
At the larger weight, he may be the much better a wrestler. That is scary.
He has positioned himself to be one of the most intriguing public faces of O-State sports in a very long time. Go Pokes! 