Chance Marsteller, a former teen phenom wrestler whose life was marred by addiction, is going to his first senior world championships after defeating Jordan Burroughs, the American record holder with seven global titles.
Marsteller, 27, reveled in the celebration on June 10 at New Jersey’s Prudential Center: congratulations from three coaches and then being enveloped just off the mat by some of the 100-plus middle and high school wrestlers that he helps coach on the side.
“Something that I fully believed in my heart for a very long time, since I was a kid, that should happen. Finally happened,” he said by phone five days later, while driving to coach those kids at a Birdsboro, Pennsylvania high school.
Marsteller continues to peel back a personal story that he began sharing publicly one year ago because it might help others.
“Addiction is a part of me, still to this day,” he said in a post-match media session, sporting a cut under his right eye. “I have to constantly remember that what I’m giving up is so that somebody else can have a better life, right? It’s not just my kids or my wife, right? Just being able to watch them have it better, more than we had when I was using. That’s something I can always rest my head at night on. I have my own club. When I look the club kids in the eyes, and I tell them this is how you do it, I can say everything with full faith.”
Marsteller said he’s a recovering addict.
He twice went to rehab for alcohol, fentanyl, heroin and oxycodone addictions. Once in 2016 following a college arrest on assault charges. The second time in 2020 after driving under the influence and wrecking two cars. He said he’s been sober since July 15, 2020, rebuilding relationships with his wife, Jenna, and sons, Cannon, 5, and Easton, 4.
“I got clean for real this time,” he said last year. “I lost just about everything in life. ... My wife was about to leave me. I was about to lose my kids. Nothing for the longest time was more important than that drug.”
Marsteller first set goals at 10 years old to become an Olympic and world champion. He then went 166-0 in four years of high school wrestling in Pennsylvania, one of the sport’s hotbed states. Flowrestling ranked him second nationally in the high school class of 2014, in between Kyle Snyder, who in 2016 won Olympic gold, and Aaron Pico, who signed an MMA contract at age 18 and is now ranked third in Bellator’s featherweight division.
Marsteller was already “the party guy” by the time legendary Penn State coach Cael Sanderson visited the family home, gaining his verbal commitment. Marsteller later changed his mind and went to Oklahoma State, the most successful wrestling school in history, led by two-time Olympic champion John Smith. He lasted less than two years in Stillwater before being suspended from the team over his behavior and ultimately transferring to Lock Haven, a little-known Division I program in Central Pennsylvania.
Four days before the start of the 2016-17 school year, police were called to a university apartment complex where a naked Marsteller was banging on doors, according to reports at the time. He was taken to a hospital.
“Got into a fight with six police officers, and a nurse is in the room,” he said in a two-hour podcast interview with “Fighting for Success” published in January. “They wrote me up 21 charges that night.”
He reluctantly spent 30 days at a rehab facility, then two more months as an outpatient. But he began using again until his second rehab stint in spring/summer 2020, which he said he entered willingly two months after wrecking his car and his wife’s car in one night.
“I knew I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing,” he said on the podcast. “I’ve hit jail. I’ve hit rehab. It’s like the only thing left for me to do is eventually die.”
When Marsteller got out of Tranquility Woods Addiction Treatment Center in Maryland in summer 2020, he said he got a call from Cary Kolat, his impactful youth coach, suggesting he stop wrestling because it was destructing his life. Marsteller disagreed and three months later called Kolat back and asked if he could train at Navy, where Kolat is the head coach. (Attempts to reach Kolat for this story were unsuccessful.)
Marsteller spent about a year training in Annapolis. The stretch included losing in the second round of the Tokyo Olympic Trials followed by five weekends in a Pennsylvania jail, punishment for the previous year’s DUI.
Around the start of 2022, Marsteller began visiting the New York City Regional Training Center in Hoboken, New Jersey, and ultimately moved there for more individual coaching and a strong group of wrestling partners.
“I wasn’t terribly surprised at him doing this [well] because he’s just that good,” said 1996 Olympic champion Kendall Cross, who is one of Marsteller’s coaches and struggled with addiction after his career. “He got derailed with the drugs and such. Once he cleared that out of his mind and out of his life and got back into the thing that he does best, it was almost too close to the trees to see the forest, right?”
Marsteller lives outside Allentown, Pennsylvania and commutes 90 minutes each way to either Hoboken or the New Jersey Regional Training Center at Princeton. Three nights a week, he also drives up to another 45 minutes in the opposite direction from home to coach at Steller Trained, his youth wrestling club.
He might love coaching more than he does wrestling because of the chance to impact lives. He got right back to work upon returning to Daniel Boone High School last week, though his students were still stirring over the victory.
“It was awesome. We were all there,” he remembers telling the teenagers. “We’ve got work to do tonight, boys. Time to lock in.”
Marsteller is ticketed for September’s world championships in Belgrade in the 79kg division, which is not an Olympic weight class.
USA Wrestling hasn’t announced its format for April’s Olympic Trials yet, but it is expected to keep its 2021 policy of giving byes to world medalists at non-Olympic weights so that they only have to win two matches to reach the Olympic Trials finals. Given Marsteller just beat the 2022 World champion at 79kg, he’s got a pretty good shot at a medal at September’s worlds.
He plans to move up in weight next year to 86kg, where David Taylor is the reigning Olympic and world champion. That might just be a bigger challenge than Burroughs.
“The farther away I get from my past, the deeper I get into sobriety and being clean, the deeper I go in this wrestling thing,” Marsteller said last month. “It just keeps getting better.”
