Scott, it's been a number of years since we've last talked. Update us on your life.
I began working for Penn State Hershey Medical Center in 1998 after spending a year fellowship in Stockholm, Sweden. Because of my experience there we have hosted 7 high school foreign exchange students. The first girl was a daughter of an orthopedic surgeon I worked with, and then it took off from there. She had a friend who wanted to come and then a cousin, etc. So we have always had some connection to at least know something about the family before they came over. They stay for the entire school year. It has been a very positive experience and we have made many friends through it. We visit Sweden every couple of years and always have a place to stay and many people to visit. Stockholm is one of the greatest cities in the world and I would encourage everyone to visit there. The Swedes probably speak better English than Americans, so it is easy to get around. My son, Patrick, also went to a year of high school in Stockholm and lived with a family of one of the kids that we hosted. His Swedish was excellent since he was fluent when we lived there when he was 6, and most Swedes couldn't tell he was American when they spoke with him.
At work I now specialize mostly in knee arthroscopy, knee ligament reconstruction, and some hip arthroscopy. I have a fairly unique clinic with my partner Dave Goodspeed, who formerly wrestled at Wisconsin. We evaluate and treat younger, active people with non-arthritic hip problems. He does the open operations, which often involve re-orientation of the socket, and I do most of the arthroscopies for labral problems or reshaping of minor bone deformities. I am involved with medical coverage of several local high schools and PIAA championships.
I recently resigned my commission as a LTC in the Army reserves. I was called up twice in support of our troops. The first in 2003 when I was sent to Fort Polk, LA and the second in 2006 when I was sent to Hawaii. As you might imagine the Hawaii deployment was much more enjoyable. Fortunately, they only keep us for active duty about 3 months so it wasn't too disruptive to my practice.
I have been volunteering as a coach for the Hershey High School wrestling team, although I don't make it to that many practices since they start at 3 and it is difficult to get away from work that early. My son, Patrick, is a senior this year and had a good year wrestling until he tore his ACL while wrestling in sectionals. It was heart breaking to watch but I was very proud of his fight and toughness. He will be having surgery in the next couple of weeks. I will have my partner do the surgery since it is too difficult to stay objective trying to operate on your own family. Unfortunately, Patrick will now miss his true sports love, tennis. I also now own 2 horses to support my daughter's love. She is getting into barrel racing and wants to go to college out west to be able to do the college rodeo circuit. She is a junior so we will be doing some western traveling this summer. (photo at right shows Scott and his family at the Colosseum in Rome) 
I try to keep myself in shape with bike riding. I probably ride about 1,500 to 2,000 miles per year and even participated in a 7 day stage race in Sept. 2008 in the Austrian Alps (see photo at left). It was extremely difficult with climbs of up to 20 miles. I wouldn't necessarily call it fun, but it was a great experience, though I did finish way behind my riding partner, John Furia, who is an orthopedic surgeon in Lewisburg. John wrestled for Brown in the late 80's.
My real aspiration though has always been to be a rock star; unfortunately I didn't have the musical talent. I do take guitar lessons now and like to play what I call "angry young man music". Dave Goodspeed and I have even formed a pseudo-band and are going to play at a party. Hopefully, we can at least sound like music.
My wife, Debbie, and I have been married for almost 26 years now. She still can't get enough of school and is taking classes to earn a master's in teaching English as a Second Language. Some of her interest came from living in Sweden and trying to learn their language. It is a truly humbling experience when a 6 year old talks to you and you have no idea what he said and he thinks you are really stupid. We love living in Hershey and it is not too bad a commute to State College for wrestling matches. I made several matches this year to watch my nephew, Adam, who was the starting 141 pounder.(Scott and Debbie at Crater Lake, Oregon in photo at right)
In your senior year at Penn State you suffered a knee injury that knocked you out of a number of matches. Talk about the injury and how it affected your regular season and preparation for the post season tournaments.
I believe my record going into the EWL tournament was 10-2 with about 5 of those coming in the East Stroudsburg tournament at Thanksgiving. I don't really know how I hurt my knee, but it began to swell continuously. Our techniques for detecting ACL injuries back then weren't that good so nobody could figure out why it was swelling. I did come back around Christmas time at 126 pounds for a couple of matches on a mid-west trip, but it began to swell and hurt again, so I ended up having a knee arthroscopy in the middle of January. I was told at the time that I had a partial ACL tear and some of the fibers of the ACL were debrided. I went on to have an ACL reconstruction about 10 years later, so either it stretched out over time or it was insufficient from the beginning. In the long run it was good that the scope of the injury wasn't appreciated at the time. That time was the infancy of understanding of ACL tears and reconstructions, so the procedures that were done at that time weren't nearly as good as the current techniques. In addition, there is a good chance they would have advised me to have surgery and stop wrestling.
After the surgery in January of 1984, I had to rehab in time to get back for the EWL's and NCAA's. I wasn't able to do a lot of live wrestling right away and I would spend hours on the stationary bike going through simulated matches. I later learned that coach Oishi would spy on me to make sure I was working hard. I made it back into the line-up at 134 pounds the week before EWL's. My first match back was against Bloomsburg against Rocky Bonomo. Bloomsburg moved the Bonomo brothers up a weight to try to win the match by pairing Ricky against Scott Webster and me against Rocky. They felt that they could win both matches that way since I was just coming back from my injury. It was a disaster for them since Ricky lost to Webster and I beat Rocky by about 18-3. The plan had been for me to drop back down to 126 pounds for the tournament, but when I started to try to lose the weight I felt horrible so I decided that I wanted to stay at 134. I had been at 126 the year before and gotten sick from cutting too much weight. I had measured 2.5% body fat by the water tank and I was also dehydrated. Our focus on proper nutrition was not as good back then. But this time, I decided I didn't want to go through that again. I called Fritzy to let him know what I wanted to do and his first response was "Lynchy, don't you want to win nationals?" I convinced him that it was the right thing for me so they allowed me to stay up.
“It was so gratifying to see Scott win his NCAA title his senior year. What made it more special was the fact that Scott was injured early mid season and had knee surgery, which at that time (before arthroscopic) involved a long recovery. Many in that position would not have made it back. He came back just in time to wrestle in the EWL, our qualifier for NCAA’s. Scott wrestled 126 as his walking around weight was about 135. I remember Scott telling me ”I want to wrestle 134 “ my response was “don’t you want to be a National Champ” and his response was ”Yes and I think I could do it easier at 134 and not have to lose that weight”. I clearly remember calling Rich Lorenzo up and discussing what Scott had said and Rich and I thinking well he really is a 126 pounder and has been one but he really believes it. How could we argue, but I have to admit, as much faith as we had in Scott, we had our doubts about this one. Well, that inner confidence and belief he had I’m sure is why he won that title and is so successful in all he does.”
-John Fritz (JF)
“Scott was a mainstay in our line-up. He was a 2 time AA and this was his senior year and the year he hoped to win the national tournament. He was real close before. But he got his knee banged up early in the season, got it operated on in January and didn’t get back into being able to do anything until February. He didn’t have a lot of body fat and he was wrestling 126 and the fact that he couldn’t work out a lot made it harder for him to make that weight so he decided he’d feel better at 134. When he said that some people questioned that thinking that perhaps he wouldn’t do as well at 134, but in order to understand this you have to understand that Scott is such a mentally strong person. I’ve coached a lot of mentally tough people and Scott ranks right up in the top 2 or 3 that I’ve ever coached.”
-Rich Lorenzo (RL)
Scott, given the amount of training you missed how did you prepare yourself mentally for the post season tournaments?
I had several injuries and surgeries throughout my career, so I was pretty used to coming back from injuries. My junior year in high school I got an infected prepatellar bursa on my left knee (my ACL tear was on my right knee) the week between Districts and Regionals. I had to have the front of my knee cut open and packed and was admitted to the hospital on a Wednesday. I left the hospital Friday morning to wrestle Friday night in the Regionals with some packing hanging out of my knee. Fortunately, I was able to win the tournament and move on to the state championships. So, because of my past experiences I was used to some of this. The other thing that helped me was that I was more of a technique wrestler and worked very hard on drilling and making sure I was able to do the moves as perfectly as possible. My focus on technique allowed me to be able to make the transition back from injury quicker.
“He was a real student of the game too. Scott knew as much about wrestling as any of the coaches. His technique was perfected. He was well rounded. He was good in all 3 positions. And pound for pound he was as strong as anybody because of the fact that he used excellent techniques and excellent leverage and was a very intelligent wrestler. He was able to neutralize his opponent’s strengths and fully exploit his own abilities.” -RL
“He was an excellent student and used his intelligence to great advantage as a wrestler. He could come off the mat and analyze how he could have done something more efficiently. He, of course, didn’t lose much but, win or lose, he would be most critical of himself. He always said he wanted to wrestle the perfect match and keeping that as a goal always kept him improving. As one of his coaches, I learned quite a bit from Scott or “Lynchy” as we called him.”
-JF
I also believe that my mental frame of mind helped me tremendously. I had been out for most of the year and was very fresh and eager and was having fun wrestling again. Earlier in the year we had been doing early morning practices and I am not a morning person so I was starting to burn out, so in some ways the injury may have helped me to get my enthusiasm back. I believe that the era of the 80's was the time of overtraining and we have now come to recognize the down sides of that. So, the injury got me out of some of that. Also, if you know me, deep down I am a pretty stubborn person and I don't like when people tell me I am not good enough or won't be able to do something. That motivates me a lot. I remember a high school teacher telling me I couldn't do electrical engineering and college wrestling at the same time since it was just too hard (I went on the get a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering at Penn State). In the case of my wrestling, though I know there was no malice in it, I could sense that everyone had given up on me and thought I had no chance of winning, especially since I was not making the drop to 126 pounds. Right before my return to the line up the coaches asked me to see a sports psychologist. I remember him commenting that I shouldn't expect too much of myself upon my return since I had been out so long. I left there extremely angry and wanted to prove to him that I was better than that. A few years later I asked him if he had done this on purpose since it really did motivate me, but he denied it. I like to challenge myself to do things that are difficult and in some ways that attitude helped me get through my injury.
“Before the NCAA tournament ever started, knowing that Scott was rehabbing from his knee surgery and didn’t get much time to train on the mat as he put himself through grueling bike workouts, I asked Scott if he wanted to get a good drill in. At this time most wrestlers were on the mat warming up before the first round. Scott looked at me and said something like I don’t need to drill I’m ready and I’m just going to think about all the training I did on the bike and someone will pay for that. I could see it in his eyes he was ready.
I have told that story to many wrestlers who have been injured It has been inspirational to me and I’m sure it has helped many others deal with adversity and turn it to a positive. It certainly was poetic justice to see Carl DeStefanis and Scott win NCAA championships at The Meadowlands.
Some of my fondest coaching memories involve Scott Lynch and I’m happy to say that we keep in touch regularly and although it hasn’t materialized, we plan to do a long bike ride together in the near future. I’m sure I’ll have to put some weights on his bike to hold him back. Scott is an amazing person and was a model student athlete. “
-JF
