THE NEAR FALL
He almost quit wrestling. He’s been arrested and nearly expelled from his school. But Taye Ghadiali’s coaches and teammates never gave up on him, and, more importantly, he never gave up on himself.
Today, he’s an NCAA All-American.
By Billy Liggett | Portrait photography by Ben Brown
Taye Ghadiali hit the mat with a violent thud. All air left his lungs. The splintering pain in his knee — the result of an ominous twist from the night before — returned like a bad dream.
One win away from the title of NCAA All-American. A feat only one Campbell University wrestler before him had ever achieved. That dream picked up and thrown down almost effortlessly by a mountain of an opponent 50 pounds his superior.
As he lay on the nine inches of padded surface and looked up at the blinding arena lights above, the young man began to accept his fate. The roar of the Kansas City crowd faded from his ears. The faces around him — his fans and teammates in orange, his coach — became a blur.
In that moment of impending defeat, Taye Ghadiali found peace.
Maybe, he thought, this wasn’t the year. There would, he told himself, be another.
He closed his eyes.
Silence. Darkness. Surrender.
All of it, interrupted by the blare of a whistle.
It’s been a month since the NCAA Men’s Wrestling Championships in Kansas City, and Taye Ghadiali is on his back again, eyes closed. The setting is much different — his surrender the result of the pulsating comfort of a large reclining massage chair. The only sound here is emanating from his air pods.
And the interruption, this time, is the opportunity to share his story — a story of how a young man from a rough suburb of Detroit, Michigan found himself wrestling on the sport’s biggest stage for a small but mighty program in rural North Carolina.
Seven minutes in — sitting inside an impossibly hot room where wrestlers go to relax and mix their protein shakes — Ghadiali gets to the part where he was handcuffed and taken away by police in front of his classmates in Campbell’s Academic Circle.
It’s his low point at Campbell University. Worse than any body slam he’d ever felt or would a year later endure.
“There was a time here when everybody wanted me gone,” says Ghadiali, now seated on a small couch next to the chair, looking at his feet and wringing his hands as he recalls rock bottom.
“And I get it. I was toxic.”
That toxicity, he says, first appeared not long after his arrival in Buies Creek. Ghadiali was an undefeated state champion in Michigan as a senior in high school, but according to him, that’s not always enough to get the attention of big Division I programs. “They go for the three- and four-timers,” he says. “So I didn’t get very many looks.”
Scotti Sentes — today the head coach of Campbell’s wrestling program but then an assistant coach to former U.S. Olympian Cary Kolat — first met Ghadiali in a summer camp that used wrestling as a way to keep troubled or at-risk teens off the street, run by one of his old college teammates at Central Michigan. Sentes later saw the young man wrestle in a senior nationals meet against some of the best recruits in the country.
While Ghadiali’s resume and measurements didn’t jump off the page, Sentes liked the raw skills and potential he saw and invited him to Buies Creek for a closer look.
“We’ve done a good job at Campbell of spotting talent that others might have overlooked,” Sentes says. “When I saw him at nationals, I told my friend he was good. And he goes, ‘No, this guy’s really, really good.’ I saw him as potentially becoming a heavyweight in terms of how he moved and his length.
“We knew we had something special, if we could just develop him in the right ways.”
Ghadiali was also getting looks from Gardner-Webb, Kent State and the school most kids in his state would give anything to wrestle for, the University of Michigan. But he agreed to meet the coaches at Campbell — mostly because of Kolat’s national reputation — even though he’d never heard of the program.
He said he was nervous to meet Kolat, who was the biggest name in U.S. wrestling in the 1990s. He was featured in a 1992 Sports Illustrated article — which dubbed him “The Best There Ever Was” — after his 137-0 high school wrestling record in Pennsylvania. He would go on to wrestle in the Olympics before starting his career in coaching.
“I was nervous, because I had to impress one of the greatest wrestlers ever, but I ended up having one of my best practices ever,” Ghadiali recalls. “I remember Kolat saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen everything I want to see.’ And he offered me a full ride right there.”
Ghadiali redshirted as a freshman during the Covid-shortened 2020 season, and posted a respectable record in limited action (per NCAA redshirt rules). Off the mat, however, he wasn’t doing quite as well. He admits to drinking, regular marijuana use and too many late nights after coming to Campbell. His first run-in with coaches cost him a portion of his scholarship money. He began to miss practices, which didn’t go over well with his teammates.
Despite his troubles, Ghadiali was an NCAA qualifier as a sophomore in 2021 after going 5-2 in Southern Conference matches and reaching the finals in the SoCon Tournament that year as a heavyweight. He lost both matches at the NCAAs, but his arrow seemed to be pointing upward.
By this time, Sentes had taken over Campbell’s wrestling program after Kolat left to coach at Navy. Despite the noise surrounding Ghadiali — which was considerable — Sentes never wavered in his faith in him.
“I could just see that despite it all, he had a big heart. I could tell he was a good person,” Sentes says. “And he was always honest with me when he made a mistake. I knew he wanted to improve; he just had a different starting place than most. I knew if I gave up on him, it wouldn’t be good for him.”
Back to that on-campus arrest in front of the student union. In front of his classmates. Ghadiali takes a deep breath.
“I’d just gotten back from nationals,” he says, referring to the end of his breakout junior year where he posted a 20-4 overall record, a SoCon championship and his first win on the national stage. “That’s when I heard the cops were looking for me.”
On July 21, 2021 — the summer before this third year at Campbell — a warrant was issued for Ghadiali’s arrest in Pitt County (Greenville) for two counts of “breaking or entering a motor vehicle” and “felony larceny” from the night before. He chooses not to go into the details of what happened that night, other than to say he got caught up in “bad things with bad people.” Not wanting to face the music back on campus, Ghadiali avoided his coaches and his family and stayed with friends that summer.
“My mom called me crying, and that hurt me bad,” he recalls. “She asked me what I was thinking. Why was I throwing my life away? She told me I needed to man up and go back home and make all of this right.”
He reached out to his coach, expecting the worst. Instead, Sentes assured Ghadiali he had not given up on him. Ghadiali called the victims in Greenville and made amends.
In some stories, this is the point where a young man might finally find the straight and narrow path and shed their demons. But Ghadiali again fell back into his bad habits upon his return to Campbell. Drinking. Smoking. Cutting back on work outs. Distancing from his teammates.
On the mat, an NCAA-qualifying heavyweight.
Off the mat, lost.
And while Ghiadali was under the impression that the incident in Greenville was behind him, a missed court date and the unresolved warrants got the attention of deputies in Harnett County. On April 1, 2022, he noticed uniformed officers outside his off-campus home in Buies Creek. While he didn’t know for sure if they were looking for him, Ghadiali had a bad feeling. He stayed inside until they were gone, and he only left a few hours later to walk his dog and grab food from the student union cafeteria on campus. Just yards away from the building, he was approached by those same deputies and asked to identify himself.
Ghadiali put his hands behind his back, was handcuffed and was taken to the patrol car. Several students looked on as it all happened. Soon he was booked and fingerprinted at the Harnett County Jail. His phone call went to Sentes, who then informed his mom. After six hours behind bars, Ghiadali was released on bond.
This was the end, Ghadiali told himself. He’d lost wrestling forever.
“I was self destructive,” he says. “Every time something good was happening, I sabotaged it. Every time somebody tried to help me or be there for me, I turned away from them.”
He was placed on disciplinary probation by the team and the school. This came with regular drug tests and check-ins with coaches. The extra attention wasn’t a bad thing. Ghadiali began to shed his bad habits.
But trouble found him again at a friend’s birthday party only a few weeks later. A fight broke out, he says, between two students (one of them a teammate), and Ghadiali filmed the incident with his phone and posted the video to social media. He could be heard laughing in the video. His name wound up in the incident report, and he was summoned to a disciplinary hearing on campus.
“They told me that was it. I was gone,” he says. “I was kicked out of school.”
It’s at this point in his story — roughly an hour in — that Ghiadali admits openly (to himself and to the room) that he deserved it. All of it. He found a small irony in the final straw being a TikTok video, considering all the bad things he’d done before, but he accepted his fate.
Sentes, however, had one more plea in him. He talked to the director of athletics, Hannah Bazemore. He talked to her father, Dr. Dennis Bazemore, then the vice president for Student Life and the disciplinary dean. He learned from both that Ghadiali had the right to an appeal.
Nobody, he was told, had ever won such an appeal.
Ghadiali went before the board and told his story. He talked about where he grew up and how that shaped him. He admitted his shortcomings. He was doing dumb things, he said, but Campbell and the wrestling program had saved him from much worse. He wrote all of this out like a term paper and read it to the group that held his future in their hands.
“Throughout my time here, my faith in God grew stronger,” he says now and said then. “God hadn’t given up on me. I asked them to do the same.”
Two weeks after his speech, he received his ruling. The appeal was granted.
Ghadiali was given his final “second chance.” He wasn’t going to mess this one up. He became a more disciplined athlete and a better student. He became a more reliable teammate. He found more meaning in his faith.
“I always believed in God. That was never the problem,” he says. “But I never really felt him. I kept him at a distance. But I believe God watched over me through all of this and had a plan for me. I didn’t always have faith in him, but he always believed in me.”
The pain coursed through his body as the wrestler from Lehigh University — a Goliath to Ghadiali’s David-like frame — lay on top of him for the final count.
Taye Ghadiali closed his eyes.
His moment of surrender didn’t last long. A blast from the referee’s whistle jolted him awake. In the corner of his eye, Ghadiali could see his coach motioning for an appeal.
Sentes had “thrown the brick” — more of a foam sponge than an actual hard clay brick — signaling an appeal on a call made just before the slam. Sentes smiles when asked what the appeal was for.
“I will just say I challenged the singlet [jersey] pull, and the video review showed that it was not a singlet pull,” he says.
The break gave Ghadiali time to regain his composure. He calls it a “mental reset.” Down 4-2 on the scorecard with about a minute left in the match, the outlook was bleak. But Ghadiali knew there was a chance.
“I could hear the fans screaming, and I was thinking at that point that it wasn’t just about me,” he says. “There were so many people who had my back through all of this and wanted this to happen. I was feeding off of that. Scotti could see I was in a dark place, and he pulled me out of that.”
Ghadiali scored a takedown with just five seconds left in the match to tie it up at 5-5 (his opponent had gained a riding time point), and when the clock hit all zeros, the match went to overtime. Riding the high, Ghadiali dove at a leg to start the extra period and latched on to send both men to the mat. He then circled around and found himself on top for the winning takedown at the 30-second mark.
The whistle blew. Taye Ghadiali was an All-American — only the second Camel to finish in the Top 8 in the nation, joining Nathan Kraisser, who did it in 2017. He’s the first non-transfer to achieve the feat. His 35 wins are the fifth-highest mark in Campbell Wrestling history, and his 12 pins are tied for second most.
“I just dropped to my knees,” Ghadiali says. “I’ve wrestled a lot in my life. But I’d never dug that deep before. God tested me, and he showed me what I can do. I just started crying. All the pain returned to my body right after that, but I didn’t care.”
Intermat, a wrestling media outlet, caught up with Ghadiali moments after his win. Still in shock, still out of breath, he poured his heart out to the camera: “I want to start by saying, ‘Thank you God.’ It’s been a hard, long journey. I’ve been almost kicked off the team. I’ve been through a lot these past years. And this one year, I gave everything to God, and I just thank God so much for this moment. I have so many people rooting for me. I’m just so grateful I can make them proud. And I know I can keep building on this.
“National champ next.”
In wrestling, a “near fall” — in layman’s terms — occurs when an opponent is almost pinned with a shoulder on the mat (or both shoulders near the mat) for a few seconds. It’s an unfortunate and costly position for any wrestler to be in, but it by no means marks the end.
Scotti Sentes has seen many near falls from his All American wrestler. But he never lost hope that the reversal was coming. Thanks to the redshirt year and the free “COVID year,” Ghadiali has one more year of eligibility at Campbell and one more chance to go for the top prize — NCAA champion.
“He’s been thrown down a lot, but he’s always found a way to get back up,” Sentes says. “He made a lot of sacrifices. He gave his life to God. It’s why I never gave up on him.”
Each year, Sentes and his coaching staff ask their wrestlers to fill out a questionnaire to get a thumb on where they’re at when it comes to culture and meeting their athletes’ needs. A few of the questions ask them to name the Top 5 hardest-working, most trust-worthy and socially responsible teammates.
Ghadiali ranked at the bottom of those lists regularly.
Until this past year.
“The athletic success is a byproduct of everything we try to do here,” Sentes says. “More than anything, we want to develop these young men to become good teammates and good people. I think Taye has done that. We’re excited to see what’s next.”
Feb. 1, 2024. Seven weeks before his rise to All-American. It all came down to Taye Ghadiali.
Through nine matches against the program’s biggest foe — Southern Conference thorn-in-the-side Appalachian State — the Camels and Mountaineers were in a virtual tie heading into the final bout between Ghadiali and the rival’s heavyweight.
The match would look nothing like Ghadiali’s gutsy comeback in Kansas City. Here, before the largest crowd to ever witness a wrestling event in Gore Arena, Ghadiali would pin his opponent in less than 90 seconds.
His win meant a 22-16 Campbell team win. And in a sight often saved for football fields and basketball courts, the Camel faithful stormed the mat.
Ghadiali was hoisted onto shoulders and carried away by the same student body that watched him taken away in handcuffs 10 months earlier.