Ranking Penn State’s Carter Starocci’s four national titles ahead of his chase for a fifth
READ MORE
2025 NCAA Wrestling Championships
The Penn State Nittany Lions won their 13th national title and made some history at the NCAA Wrestling Championships in Philadelphia. Read all of our coverage here.
Expand All
Penn State’s Carter Starocci will attempt to be the first five-time individual NCAA wrestling champion this weekend when he heads to Philadelphia with the rest of the Nittany Lions for the 2025 NCAA Wrestling Championships. The extra year of eligibility athletes were given due to COVID will give him an opportunity to do something that has never been done before and may never be done again.
Before that, though, there were the other four times Starocci — who is wrestling at 184 pounds this season — became a national champion. Unlike this year, all of those championships came at 174 pounds.
And each of those four came with their own unique set of circumstances and challenges that set him on his way to chase a fifth national championship.
Here are our rankings of Starocci’s four previous national titles.
1. 2024 — Starocci defeats Ohio State’s Rocco Welsh by decision, 2-0
The top spot here isn’t necessarily about who Starocci defeated or his dominance in the bout — it’s about what it took for him to get to the bout and compete in the match. The Nittany Lion suffered an injury late in the regular season that forced him to injury default twice at Big Tens, giving him his only two losses since the 2021 season. Starocci competed at NCAAs with a leg brace on his right knee and an injury that was not fully healed. Yet, he fought through the injury and managed to go 5-0 in the tournament to earn his fourth national title.
2. 2021 — Starocci defeats Iowa’s Michael Kemerer by decision, 3-1, in sudden victory
If not for the injury last season, this would be at the top of the list. Starocci was not quite the force in 2021 that he is now, but his ability was abundantly clear. He entered nationals with two losses to his name — a fluky 10-9 defeat to Indiana’s Donnell Washington to begin his season and a loss in the Big Ten title match to Iowa’s Michael Kemerer. Kemerer’s 7-2 win at Big Tens proved he was still at the top of the weight class in the country, but Starocci was out to prove that wasn’t the case. And at nationals he did it with a takedown in sudden victory to knock off Kemerer and win his first individual title
3. 2022 — Starocci defeats Virginia Tech’s Mekhi Lewis by decision, 6-5, in tiebreaks
Starocci’s win over Kemerer propelled him to an undefeated 2022 that concluded with his win over Lewis in tiebreaks. That year was supposed to build toward three potential matchups with the Hawkeye, but Kemerer medically forfeited at Big Tens and was unable to reach the finals at NCAAs — and Starocci won the matchup at the tightly contested regular season dual between PSU and Iowa. Still, Starocci took care of business on his way to an NCAA title even if he never got his postseason rematch with Kemerer, bringing his undefeated streak at that point to 27 matches. And he did so by escaping in tiebreaks after only six seconds and earning enough riding time to get the win over Lewis.
4. 2023 — Starocci defeats Nebraska’s Mikey Labriola by fall in 2:46
It says a lot about how successful Starocci has been that this is fourth. Of course, there’s the caveat that you could flip this one and 2022 and the list would still make sense. Starocci was firing on all cylinders at this point in his career with a 60-match win streak in tow heading into his final against Labriola, who he’d already defeated in 2022. The Nittany Lion earned the first takedown of the bout and an attempted roll by the Cornhusker led to him getting caught by Starocci and pinned in the first period. The reason this isn’t higher is largely because there wasn’t nearly as much tension — or as much to overcome — as there was in the other three.
This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
