IOWA CITY – Following a historic day in 2015 at Kinnick Stadium, when the Iowa wrestling program upended the No. 1-ranked Oklahoma State in front of the largest crowd for a collegiate wrestling dual ever, Tom Brands went out to a tailgate at the football practice facility for the upcoming Minnesota-Iowa football game.

A man named Bob Nicolls approached him. They chatted briefly, trading comments as people do at a tailgate. Nicolls was insistent that he could be of help, as a Hawkeye wrestling fan since his days as a freshman and then as a real-estate businessman in operating Monarch Investments. He approached Iowa wrestling’s director of operations at the time, Luke Eustice.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Nicolls told Eustice.

Eustice passed that message to Brands. Not long after, Brands gave Nicolls a call. He and Eustice were headed to Colorado in a car, driving hundreds of miles to have a visit at 7 a.m. the next morning.

After that meet-up, Brands and Eustice walked out of Nicolls’ office in Colorado with a $50,000 check for the Hawkeye Wrestling Club and a $1,000,000 commitment to helping build a new practice facility for Iowa. The Iowa wrestling room was named after Bob and his wife, Kathy Nicolls. That commitment later expanded to $3,000,000.

The facility itself, which was officially unveiled Thursday, is named the Goschke Family Wrestling Training Center, after Doug and Ann Goschke. When Brands met with the Goschke family at their home to discuss the project, he remembers their family dog dashing over the kitchen table and sitting on his lap.

It’s little stories like that of Brands meeting passionate Hawkeye wrestling fans that led to this $31 million facility for the Hawkeyes, all of which has been privately funded.

“In this endeavor, I’ve made a lot of friends,” Brands said. “I’m a pretty gracious person when it comes to being thankful and showing gratitude, so they got me as a friend whether they want to or not.”

‘We have to continue to lead.’

Before you can even reach the main doors, you have to pass the Dan Gable statue with his fist raised high, moved from his original location by the northwest entrance and directly above where the Dan Gable Wrestling Complex was.

Upon entry, you’re greeted with what is dubbed a “Hall of Champions” with team and individual trophies. Also on the first floor are coach and staff offices. Those offices have windows that look down onto the wrestling mats on the lower level.

The first level also includes individual men’s and women’s lounges that house areas to relax, but also nutrition stations and other amenities to promote physical and mental well-being.

On the lower level is where much of the competing is set to occur. Upon going downstairs, the floor opens up to a six-mat-wide wrestling room. Ropes dangle from the ceiling along with televisions plastered on the wall.

The most important feature of that wrestling room, Brands said, may be the layout. Adjacent to the mats and directly underneath where the mats lie is the strength and training center. Athletic training areas to treat injuries and fatigue are accessible right off the mats, as well as bikes with tablets stationed around the outskirts of the mats.

Brands said that was a part of the old facility, an idea introduced by Dan Gable. Brands added the additional athletic training portion to that flow. The idea centers around being able to move from one workout to the next with no delay. Having the athletic training space close by requires and reminds athletes to check in when needed.

Brands and the staff received pushback for trying to implement that once again in the new facility, but that was a deal breaker.

“Notice the flow, it’s by design,” Brands said. “It will get better with time. We will learn how to use it better. We will put more powerful and more credentialed athletes in this space and win championships.”

Down on the lower level are also men’s and women’s locker rooms and individual ice bath and sauna areas. Prior to this facility opening, the women were required to share locker-room space with the opposing teams in Carver-Hawkeye Arena since the previous facility did not have space.

“This personal space allows us to mentally and physically prepare for the battles ahead,” Iowa women’s wrestler Nyla Valencia said. “It ensures we can focus entirely on our performance and well-being.”

From that floor, Hawkeye wrestlers will be able to prepare and race down the tunnel to Carver-Hawkeye Arena for matches.

With the price tag large and a 38,000 square-foot building to build in, the Hawkeyes’ programs have the nation’s premier wrestling facility. That comes at a time when the inevitability of revenue-sharing has prevented other programs from moving forward with projects of their own and will continue to do so in the future.

Iowa is not interested in being in an arms race with other programs, Brands said. This was another step for the men’s program to return to a championship level after missing out on a team trophy this past season, and just as important, a place the women’s program can continue to dominate as it did in its inaugural season.

“We have to continue to lead,” Brands said. “I don’t think we’re in a race to put great facilities in the ground to be ahead of the competition. You look at what’s necessary. We still have a lot of work to do. Our donors dug deep, they stepped up. Now, we got to perform.”

Eli McKown covers high school sports and wrestling for the Des Moines Register. Contact him at Emckown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @EMcKown23

It’s been the longest drought in Iowa in more than 60 years

For the first time in nearly four years, Iowa is drought-free.

Only parts of Eastern Iowa were categorized as “abnormally dry” Thursday, but they fell out of the four drought categories assigned by the U.S. Drought Monitor.

“This is really exciting,” Iowa State University’s Agricultural Climatologist Madelynn Wuestenberg said. “Leading up to spring, we knew we would need above-average rainfall to bust this drought, and that’s exactly what we saw.”

Iowa is out of drought conditions because the state has experienced record rainfall over the past two months, State Climatologist Justin Glisan said.

This year, he said, has been among the wettest starts of the year in the 152 years rainfall has been tracked in Iowa.

“Across the state, we’re about 16 inches (of rain) for the year, and that is almost 6 inches above average,” Glisan said. “Getting 150 percent above normal (rainfall) in April and May is when you bank soil moisture and start chipping away at the precipitation deficit.”

For the last 203 weeks, at least part of Iowa had a D1 (moderate drought) rating. The last date the state had no drought rating was June 30, 2020.

Glisan said this most recent drought was the longest Iowa has had in over 60 years.

Before Thursday, Iowa was one of three states — Oklahoma and New Mexico being the others — in a record drought, he said.

Last year, which saw only about 27 inches of precipitation — nearly 9 inches less than normal — was Iowa’s 22nd driest in 151 years of records, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reported in January. It also tied 2016 as the 10th warmest year on record.

The worst of Iowa’s drought was recorded Dec. 19, 2023, when 35 percent of the state was classified as being in “extreme drought.”

Glisan said the removal of drought status goes hand in hand with the severe weather the state has experienced recently. More than 100 tornadoes have been reported in Iowa this year, the most in more than a decade.

As we enter the year’s warmest months, Iowa will need consistent rainfall to keep the soil moisture balanced and maintain its drought-free status, Glisan said.

“We’ll need timely rainfall to ensure it’s not too dry but also not too wet,” he said. “There is always a potential we see drought reemerge, given how long the 2020 to 2024 drought was.”

Outlook

Iowa’s seven-day weather forecast predicts 1 to 2 inches of rain.

If that level of rainfall continues into June, the eastern parts of the state still labeled “abnormally dry” could lose that status.

Wuestenberg, of ISU, said decreasing drought can be a double-edged sword for farmers since fields can become too wet to plant crops.

“If farmers haven’t finished planting by April or May, then these wet conditions can keep you out of the field or create ponding,” she said. “If you have already planted crops, there can be emergence issues because you get rainfall on the soil, which creates a crust and causes a barrier for crops to burst through the surface.”

Comments: (319)-265-6889; cooper.worth@thegazette.com

An EF-4 tornado carved a path of destruction through Greenfield, Iowa, on May 21, 2024. With peak winds of 185 miles per hour, the twister’s rampage through the little town is visible in this image captured by the Sentinel 2 satellite on May 25. (Credit: Modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by Tom Yulsman)

It has been quite a spring for twisters in the United States. So far this year, the preliminary tally from the Storm Prediction Center has reached 1,035 tornadoes, with 872 of them occurring in April and May.

And we’ve still got another peak month of activity left to go.

One of the most destructive of this season’s tornadoes spun up on Tuesday, May 21 in southwestern Iowa. It then carved a destructive 44-mile path to the northeast, ultimately rampaging through tiny Greenfield, population 2,062. Spinning at 185 miles per hour, the EF-4 twister reached a terrifying maximum extent of more than a half mile wide.

Tragically, it killed five people in Greenfield.

The gash it cut through the town is seen in the satellite image above, and also in this one released by NASA today:

This spring’s tornadic toll has been driven by the clash of two air masses: relatively cool air to the north and west, and a gigantic, stagnant, high-pressure dome of hot air parked over Mexico and the U.S. Gulf States. The jet stream coursing between these clashing air masses has swept a series of storm systems through Texas, Oklahoma and up into the Midwest.

The result: huge thunderstorms with powerful convective updrafts that propelled moist air high into the atmosphere — sometimes into the stratosphere in a phenomenon called overshooting cloud tops.

“When this type of updraft ingests a very unstable airmass with large vertical wind shear, catastrophic tornadoes and large hail are often the result,” says Kristopher Bedka, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, quoted in a post at NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Preliminary data shows that there have been four days with at least 30 tornadoes rated EF-1 or stronger in the United States. The average is two annually. According to Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory, quoted in a story in USA Today, that likely puts 2024 in the top 10 percent of years.