WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - When you're a four-time high school state champion, you're probably pretty good. Honestly, you're likely very good at whatever sport you're competing in. You just spent the last four years of your life being better than anyone else in your ENTIRE STATE at your sport of choice. That's likely enough winning and enough confidence to send a young student-athlete to college with a high level of belief in themselves and their abilities. It's no secret that college athletics is a whole different kind of animal, and that the level of competition rises to a new level. Eighteen-year old freshmen start competing against 22 or 23-year old grown adults, who have spent years in a college weight room, sharpening their skills against an elite group of competitors, both on their own team and across the country. The experience is humbling for most, brutal for some and career-ending for others, squashing many college dreams before they ever begin. What do you do when you go from being the best that anyone you knew had ever heard of, to being just another body, or worse, the lowest rung on the ladder? How do you get back up when you've been knocked so far down? Purdue University wrestling's Parker Filius may not have all the answers to this question, but he's probably got a few ideas that could help a lot of people out.
There's no reason to bury the lede here; this is a story about mental health, mental strength and fortitude. When times get tough, when you face adversity, when we meet challenges in life, we're left with the choice to either give up or forge on. That's clearly oversimplifying the process, but it's what most things boil down to.
Filius came to Purdue in the fall of 2017, on the heels of one of the best careers in Montana high school history. He won 169 matches in four seasons, became the first four-time state champion in this history of Havre High School and helped lead his team to four straight state team titles. He won the 2017 USA Wrestling Junior Folkstyle national title, was a three-time junior freestyle All-American, was rated as a top-50 recruit in his class and was even a two-time all-state football player. He had every reason to enter college ready to embark on a highly successful career that included a litany of wins, awards and championships.
"I thought I was going to be able to come in as a true freshman and bang with everyone right away," said Filius. "I thought I could get in the lineup, get to nationals, earn All-America and compete for a national title. Expectations were super high."
Some of those things came true for Filius, while others didn't. A solid redshirt freshman campaign at 141 pounds had him ready to start competing at the varsity level, but there was a small problem. The Boilermakers were sitting with two guys who were talented enough to be in the starting lineup, but both at the same weight class. Rising junior and returning NCAA qualifier Nate Limmex was the incumbent starter at 141 pounds, meaning one of the two guys was going to have to go up to 149 if both were to be starters. Head coach Tony Ersland sat down with the two and talked it out, and Filius made the choice to go up. He thought he could use the offseason to focus on wrestling, bulking up and growing into the weight.
"I didn't grow into the weight the way I thought I would," said Filius. "I thought it was in my best interest at the time, but I'm not sure I would do it the same way if I had to do it over again."
Things started well for Filius, going 8-2 over his first 10 career varsity matches. He went 3-2 at the Princeton Open, earning sixth place, and followed up with a pair of wins at the Journeymen Northeast Duals, pinning both opponents in dominant team victories for the Boilermakers. Filius went on to win his division of the Journeymen Collegiate Classic with a 3-0 record and his third fall of the weekend, heading back to West Lafayette with a boatload of confidence in tow.
He would suffer a small setback at third-ranked Iowa, falling 2-0 in front of 8,000 fans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, but it was at the 2018 Cliff Keen Las Vegas Invitational that the wheels would start coming off the bus. Filius drew 17th-ranked Ryan Blees of Virginia Tech in the opening round of the tournament, and while the 7-4 loss didn't look bad on paper it shook Filius' state of mind and put the rest of the season on tilt.
Filius took down the No. 9 tournament seed twice in the first period, building a 4-1 lead and primed for the upset. Blees slowly started coming back, using an escape and a takedown to tie things at 4-4 after two periods, and as things went down to the wire Filius got in deep on a shot, but was unable to finish, gave up a takedown and surrendered the match. Instead of leaving the match with the realization that he was right there with one of the top guys in the country and had a chance to beat him, Filius focused on his mistakes and was unhappy with his performance.
"I started looking at things as if I only won or lost," said Filius. "I won or lost this position, I won or lost this match; it got pretty heavy, pretty quickly and I started becoming critical of everything I was doing, and my confidence fell with that."
After two losses in Las Vegas Filius found himself in unchartered territory, having lost three in a row for the first time that he could remember, and with a month-long break from wrestling to think about it. Instead of focusing on improving and performing at a higher level, he stewed on the losses. They ate at him over time, taking his focus away from the daily tasks in the practice room that could've helped him rebound.
"It's really hard to get better when you're thinking like that," said Filius. "It wasn't like I wasn't working hard, I was, but you have to work your mind in the same way that you work your body, and I didn't understand that at that point."
This opened a brutal stretch for the Boilermaker freshman as he would taste victory just once through the remainder of his freshman season. He went 1-3 at the South Beach Duals and then went winless over the final 10 duals of the season. He finished up the year with two losses at the Big Ten Championships, finishing 9-20 overall with 15 straight losses to conclude the campaign.
"Everything became about the mistakes I made last week, looking back on my losses," Filius reflected. "There was no focus on my strengths, I wasn't doing anything to make myself feel better. When you look at something as if it's broken, it leads to a lack of confidence."
Things got dark for Filius. After his two losses at the Big Ten Championships he remembered sitting in the hallway by himself, crying, feeling lower than he could ever remember. He didn't want to talk to anyone, disregarding his teammates, coaches, even random people passing by, who could tell that he was struggling. He wasn't doing much to hide it.
Filius survived the day without much interaction with anyone, and got up the next day to a lesson from his head coach, that he didn't really appreciate at the time, but has come to love. "So the sun came up today, huh?" asked Ersland. "You're healthy, your family is healthy, it's gonna be okay."
Disregarding the comment and continuing with his frustrations, Filius didn't sleep much the next two weeks. He found himself questioning everything, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Asking things like: is Purdue is the right place for me? Do I need to go somewhere else? Is all of this worth it? How did I get here? In addition to the crippling questions going on in his mind, Filius was still going to practice to help his teammates prepare for the NCAA Championships that he failed to qualify for. He wanted time to decompress, to get away for a while, but he was there in the practice room with contempt for being there. He was lost and he needed to find his way back to the sport that he loved.
"He wasn't himself, not even a little bit," said teammate and roommate Thomas Penola. "His habits changed, his behavior changed, and it was hard to be his friend and not tell him that he wasn't doing the right things. The good news is that he became better in the end of it. He found a way to open up, he found some perspective in his life and leaned on other people, and we became better friends and teammates."
"There's a lot of things that guys don't talk about when they struggle like that," said Filius. "It was brutal to keep that all bottled up and suffer. It was a hard way to learn, but I found that life gets a lot easier when you let some of it out and talk to people."
What came next happened in two pieces. A conversation with former Purdue assistant coach, and fellow Montana native, Tyrel Todd got Filius started back on the right track. He made a decision to return to his natural competition weight of 141 pounds, and go all-in on what it would take for him to be successful there. The second part, however, is where the big strides would come.
Filius started making regular appointments with Purdue sports psychologist Dr. Brad Foltz. Filius had dabbled in sports psychology before, attending team gatherings on the topic during his redshirt year, and making a few appointments at the behest of Ersland and assistant coach Jake Sueflohn during the second half of his freshman year. He found those meetings fruitless in the past, but knew that if he was going to make a change, he was going to have to be all-in both on and off the mat.
Things started by just talking. Talking about life, about wrestling, about all the things that were wrong and all the things that were right. Then came the reading. Filius started diving into books that had to do with sports psychology, and he would talk through those with Foltz, looking for more answers. He started finding ways to apply lessons to performance, to help keep him in the moment and focus on the next five seconds. Those lessons paid off.
The early gains came in the freestyle season, his training got better. He started making mental jumps with improved focus and confidence, that in turn was affecting his wrestling. He got better at wrestling through fatigue, he improved his execution toward the end of practice and everything became more fun. You could start to see things come together before the USA Wrestling U23 men's freestyle world team trials in June of 2019, and Filius knew he was capable of performing well in a major tournament. He just had to translate that feeling into success on the mat.
He followed through with his intentions, finishing seventh in a 128-man bracket at 65 kg with an 8-2 overall record. Six of his eight wins came by technical fall and he reaffirmed everything that he had been putting into his preparation for the tournament. The mental work was improving the physical output, and he was getting back into that place where he loved wrestling, and equally important, he loved wrestling at Purdue.
The 2019-20 season came with a fresh slate and a variety of change, setting the table for Filius to take big steps. The move back to 141 pounds came easy, ready to go after the starting job at his preferred weight class, all the while sharpening his mind along with this physique. He was one of several Boilermakers to change weight classes, and when the dust settled he had earned the nod to start at 141 for his team. He was ready for the challenge.
Filius opened the season with his team at the Michigan State Open, and faced a tough draw right out of the gates. His first opponent of 2019-20 was two-time NCAA qualifier and 2017 Mid-American Conference Champion Shakur Laney of Ohio University, and Filius was ready. He built a 7-4 lead in the second period, riding Laney the entire second before catching him in a cradle and scoring the fall to advance. The win propelled Filius to a third-place finish at the event and ignited a strong start to his sophomore campaign.
He won his next eight matches, sweeping the Journeymen Northeast Duals, earning dual wins at North Dakota State and Southern Illinois Edwardsville, and stood 10-1 going into the holiday break, but something was missing. Unlike the past, he had started to understand it wasn't about the wins and losses, but more on how he was performing, and he wasn't performing where he thought he should be.
"I was doing enough to win, but I wasn't trying to score as much as I could or compete as hard as I could," remembered Filius. "I was winning by two or three points, when I should've been winning by six or eight. I wasn't giving my coaches or my team everything I had, and I knew this had to change."
He found out that he was right at the 2019 Midlands Championships. He had a decent tournament, going 3-2 and reaching the round of 12 before bowing out, but he knew it should've been better. He let his first loss slip away after an early lead, and let things get out of hand quickly in his second loss and didn't battle back. He had to get back to his place of mental strength, and Ersland was right there waiting to help him.
"We had to have some hard conversations there, and we had to lay out some truth," said Ersland. "To continue to tell a guy that you do the right things and it'll eventually turn for you doesn't work if you can't be honest with each other. I told him some hard truths, which painted the picture of why he wasn't getting what he wanted, and he had to take that truth and make some changes."
After that honest conversation with his coach, and permission given to continue that honesty, Filius went back to work. He knew that there was more he could do, so he gave his coaches the green light to train him the way he needed to train, to get where he needed to go. It all moved the needle in the right way, physically and mentally.
The rest of the year went well for Filius. It would be awesome to say that he won every match, that he took home a Big Ten title and a national championship and rode off into the sunset, but it's not that kind of fairy tale. He won some and lost some, wrestled great at times, and just okay at others. He picked up huge wins for his team at Rutgers and Illinois, playing a major role in dual victories that would carry the Boilermakers to their first winning conference dual season since 2013. He took eighth place at the Big Ten Championships, earning an automatic bid to the NCAA Championships, avenging a key loss in the season and helping his team to a fifth-place showing, their highest conference tournament placing since 1992.
His 19-10 overall record marked one of the nation's biggest turnarounds at any weight and he was named the Boilermakers' most improved wrestler. He scored at Big Ten's for the first time, he qualified for his first national championships, but he understands that he's nowhere near done. Everything has become part of the process.
His realization was no more evident than the moment he defeated Alec McKenna of Northwestern at the Big Ten Championships to earn his NCAA bid. There was no celebration, no pointing to his family in the stands, no giant hugs with his coaches, just a few high fives and handshakes. A moment that was monumental in comparison to one year before, was just a footnote in what he remembered as an incredible accomplishment for his team and a building block toward his bigger goals.
When it all stacked up at the end of 2020, how many times do you think Filius thought about his freshman year? None. Not once.
"Ersland teaches us to live in the moment, focus on what's right in front of us, and I'm getting there," said Filius.
This story is nowhere near done. Filius still has lots to learn, lots to work on and two more years of college wrestling in which to work on it. An outstanding student in the classroom, where he holds an impressive grade point average as a construction management major, Filius aims to further his studious nature on the mat and in his own headspace. Training his body and mind for what comes next is the top priority.
"Expectations are still high, I want to win conference titles, I want to be an All-American, I want to win an NCAA Championship," said Filius. "To get there I've got to have my best performances, so instead of thinking about those tangible things, I'm going to focus on performing at my highest level. At that point, whatever comes, comes."
He continued, "If those things happen for me, it's great, but if I don't reach those goals and still perform to the best of my ability, I have nothing to look back at. No regrets."
Mirroring life, being a college athlete comes with a variety of highs and lows, championships and failures, victories and losses. How student-athletes deal with this emotional roller coaster is often closely tied to the overall level of success in their careers. Not just the successes perceived by the outside world, but the infinitely more-important self-perception that a young man or woman has when they revisit their career after it's concluded. The ability to get back up after you've been knocked down, to continually answer the bell in every round of life, to have the mental fortitude to withstand life's challenges, that's the lesson here. As previously stated, Filius doesn't have all the answers, but he hopes that he can help a few more people get the right idea.