Editor's note: Head Coach Marty Nichols was originally misidentified as Jim Nichols.

Last season, then-junior Willie Horwath sat in Head Coach Marty Nichols’ office and decided to call then-senior Jon Paxos while he was at Wegmans.

“I said [to Jon], ‘Oh, I’m over by the Gatorade. Come meet me over there,’” Horwath said. “And I guess he walked over there and called me up and said, ‘Where are you at? You around here?’ I said, ‘Oh I went back over. I’m getting some lunch meat now.’ I had him walking all over the place, and I wasn’t even there. That was pretty funny.”

Horwath eventually ended the prank and told Paxos he was just pulling his chain.

Even though Horwath is quite the jokester, when it comes to succeeding on the mat, he’s all business. Two weeks ago at Cornell’s Body Bar Invitational, he went 3–3, putting his career record to 102–36. He is only the 20th Bomber in program history to reach 100 career wins and the only one on the current team to do so.

With all of his success on the mat, his teammates still recognize him most for his antics, such as leading a freshman to believe he was on Ithaca’s bus when he was actually on SUNY-Cortland’s.

Senior Chad Winowich, the 133-pound All-American tri-captain, whose locker is right next to Horwath’s, gets a good perspective of the kind of jokester Horwath is.

“He’s singing the whole time [we’re in the locker room],” Winowich said. “We shower and get ready and change, and he’s pretty much singing the whole time. Besides that, he’s kind of a prankster, and you wouldn’t think it.”

But when Horwath is on or around the mat, his body language and how he conducts himself reflect how seriously he handles competition.

Though the 157-pounder is an All-American, he avoids the spotlight, as others on the Blue and Gold are more outgoing than he is. Horwath stands on the side of the mat before and after his bouts, reserved and quiet as he goes through his warm-ups and watches his teammates compete.

While he remains quiet on the sidelines, he is actually one of the more boisterous individuals on the squad.

“I tend to pull a lot of pranks on people sarcasmwise,” Horwath said. “If someone asks me a question, I usually lie to them with a straight face. Half the time, they believe me, and it’s just stuff like that. People are real gullible to my jokes. I’m sort of like a goof. It’s not like normal humor. I do really weird stuff.”

Winowich said Horwath’s thought process tends to be much different than most of the other wrestlers on the team.

“Day to day, he’s just got a different way at looking at things,” Winowich said. “He’s got a different way of looking at everything actually. So you never really know what he’s going to say or what he’s thinking. That’s probably the funnest thing about him [and] what keeps the whole team on our toes — because we never really know where his head is.”

Horwath led the team last season with 36 wins on his way to a 15–0 dual-meet record. Head Coach Marty Nichols said his success has helped the team as a whole.

“I guess we would call him [one of] those good Pennsylvania wrestlers — good basics, always in good position, hard to score on, consistent,” Nichols said. “[He’s] probably [in that] 1 percent of the guys that have wrestled [in] college ever to get 100 wins, maybe less than 1 percent. He’s one of those guys you hope you can find, and we’re happy to have him. That’s for sure.”