Chad Zaputil

2022 Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame Inductee

Chad Zaputil is the epitome of a person who sees his glass as half full. Despite a handful of disappointing losses at crucial times in his wrestling career, Zaputil never wavered and looks back on his time at Centerville High School and the University of Iowa with nothing but fond memories.

Zaputil’s disappointments came in NCAA championship matches three years in a row. “The regrets are there, but you have to move on… learn from them, turn them into progress, and keep moving forward. I had beaten the guys who won the national titles, it just didn’t happen in those matches,” Zaputil stated.

Perhaps the reason for Zaputil’s attitude can be seen in the incredible amount of success he had during his wrestling career. Zaputil won two state championships for Centerville, and in three high school title matches, he wrestled three legends of the sport. In his final three years at Centerville, he went 95-1 while facing Terry Brands, Tom Brands, and Kent Streicher in the state finals. Both of his state titles came in overtime. One win was against Streicher, who at the time had been labeled “the next four-time state champion.”

Zaputil recalled losing at the state tournament as a high school freshman and how it forced him to reset his focus. He noted that he and his teammates were the first in southern Iowa to train year-round. “We learned that you get what you put into it, and it paid off because we won the school’s first state team title.”

That success continued into his collegiate career, where he posted a 109-8-1 record for Dan Gable’s Iowa Hawkeyes and was a three-time Big Ten Champion and three-time NCAA Runner-up. During that time, the team won three NCAA team titles. Many consider that run to be among the best in Hawkeye history. During that stretch, the Hawkeyes won team titles by 48.25, 48.5, and 36.25 points.

“We had an awesome group of wrestlers at Iowa. We all pushed each other to get better every day. We were a very close group who would also eat together and relax together,” Zaputil recalled. “It was a tough group at one point, we had 11 returning All-Americans on a ten-man squad.” He also noted that several wrestlers who transferred from Iowa went on to become All-Americans at other schools.

He emphasized how the intensity of teammates Tom and Terry Brands carried through the entire team. “Heck, we could turn a game of Monopoly into a riot,” he said with a smile.

Now, later in life, Zaputil cherishes the friendships developed through wrestling. “Some of my toughest opponents are now good friends. Once a wrestler, always a wrestler. People see my cauliflower ears and ask me about wrestling. When I say I wrestled for Dan Gable and Iowa, the conversations just flow.”

Zaputil, a 2022 inductee, was originally set to be inducted into the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2020 alongside Tom Hogan, Tom Huff, and G. Wyatt Schultz, but the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 and 2021 banquet.