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Veteran Frye Anchors Defensive Line While Satisfying His Passion For Wrestling
9/8/2021 3:45:00 PM | Football
This story originally ran in the Football Issue of GoDuke, the Magazine -- Aug. 2020
In the world of collegiate athletics, it is often undersold just how extraordinary the commitment of a two-sport athlete can be. While the concept of being a part of multiple teams — enjoying the camaraderie of two different groups, training in alternative settings, constantly finding yourself in an athletic environment — may sound appealing to many while they make the transition from high school to college, the reality is that it requires a specific kind of person to handle such a balance.
Throw in the rigorous demands of an elite academic institution like Duke University on top of that, and you find a lifestyle that few would envy and even fewer could manage. It takes a distinguished combination of exceptional athletic ability and unwavering discipline in the classroom. It takes a competitor, in every sense of the word.
It takes someone like Ben Frye.
To many around him, and perhaps even if pressed himself, Frye would tell you he is a football player. The 6-foot-3, 255-pound defensive lineman enters his fifth year with the Duke program in 2021 and is looking to build off a redshirt senior season that saw him appear in all 11 games and collect 28 tackles (three for loss) with a pair of assisted sacks. After redshirting as a freshman in 2017, he has steadily increased his stats in nearly every category over the last three years and knows that a larger role is on the horizon beginning Friday, Sept. 3 in the team's season opener at Charlotte.
Frye's success at the Division I level would appear to most as, if not predictable, unsurprising. The Dublin, Ohio native was a first-team all-state selection by the Associated Press his senior season at Coffman High School, when he was also named his conference's co-defensive player of the year. Yet with all his accolades stemming from his performance on the gridiron, and not to mention his upbringing in the sport — his father, Scott, played at NAIA university Olivet Nazarene — Frye arrived at Duke with an additional love for wrestling, which he went on to pursue during his undergraduate career.
His first taste of wrestling came in eighth grade, when he decided to try out for his middle school team simply because a few of his friends did it. Although acknowledging that his parents were not fully behind the idea of their son exploring another high-contact sport, Frye committed to the tryout partly to disprove what he thought was a ridiculous notion, that something else could be more strenuous than football.
"It was one of those things where they were like, 'Wrestling is so much harder than football,' and I thought football is a tough sport," he said. "I thought I would come in and be like, 'I'll show you guys,' and it ended up changing my mind immediately. That was in middle school and was probably the hardest thing I'd ever done. I loved the challenge of it. I kind of got hooked after my first practice, just completely dead."
From then on, Frye knew he had found something that would not only keep him in shape during the offseason, but would also lend itself to the technical nature of being a defensive lineman. He found many similarities in the strength, leverage and dexterity needed to have success in each sport, and was prepared to embark on four years of high school that included both. However, he learned early that the physical nature of playing football before transitioning to wrestling shortly after takes a toll.
"I got injured my freshman and sophomore year," Frye said. "I had a pretty bad back injury, so I wasn't able to actually wrestle. I was limited on the football field those two years, but I was still around the wrestling community. Then, my junior and senior year, that's when I really started to pick things up with both."
The wrestling community is a tight-knit one that, for the most part, is built on families passing the sport down through generations. It is not always typical for a high school athlete to pick up wrestling as a hobby and break into that mold, but even while recovering from injuries, Frye maintained his connection with it.
He placed fourth in the state tournament as a junior, with obvious signs of rapid improvement that year. Frye recalls that being his first exposure to a traditional wrestling season, since his total experience up to that point was being a part of a middle school team that, as he put it, wasn't as intensive. One source of confidence was pulled from the geographic location that he was collecting wins in, as Frye was well aware of the prominent wrestling culture in his home state.
"Growing up, I knew Ohio was tough," he said. "They say that state tournament is one of the hardest tournaments in the country, even compared to all these invitation, nationally-ranked tournaments that guys go to in the offseason. The IRONMAN is considered the hardest tournament in the country — that's in Ohio. If you look at a college roster, almost 50 percent of those guys are going to be from Ohio, Iowa or Pennsylvania."
Advancing to the state semifinals in the midwest did not go unnoticed, no matter how relatively unseasoned Frye was in the sport. Following his loss, he was contacted by Virginia head coach Steve Garland, a recognition that he had not even received in football at that time in his career.
"It was my first offer and exposure talking to a college coach," Frye said. "I was like, 'This isn't even my main sport.' It was right after I'd wrestled the number one kid in the country in Ohio. I think he had pinned everybody, and I lost, but I guess I did well against him. I took him to all three periods and pushed the pace. I was surprised I got any interest after losing a match, but it was a cool experience. It was out of nowhere."
For a competitor like Frye, getting a look from a Division I program was all he needed to fully immerse himself in wrestling his senior year. He enjoyed a breakout season, putting together an incredible 49-0 record en route to the state finals. In comparison to many of the athletes he was beating, Frye was still inexperienced, but he remembers using a trust of the basics, his uncommon athleticism and an unrelenting drive that helped him overcome his lack of a wrestling background. When he suffered his first loss via takedown in that state final match, he temporarily felt that it may be time to call it a career, short as it may have been. After all, even with his meteoric rise through the wrestling ranks, Frye's first love remained football, and he was ready to spend his years in college focusing on the line of scrimmage even if it meant sacrificing time on the mat.
Of course, his competitive nature would not allow that to happen for very long. Frye redshirted his freshman season with the Blue Devils, and after seeing action in six games in 2018, he suffered another injury, this time tearing his left ACL. He endured a full recovery process and was on the field for 88 snaps over eight games as a redshirt junior, compiling nine tackles, including a three-tackle performance against 15th-ranked Notre Dame. Through that entire period, though, he kept wrestling stored in the back of his mind, often thinking back to his senior year in high school and wondering what could've been had he continued his development.
He began going to Duke matches, marveling at the effort that went into competing at such a high level. Eventually, at the end of 2019, Frye reached out to head coach Glen Lanham with an idea.
"I started talking to the wrestling coach because I would go to every match and I just loved how those guys worked so hard," he recalls. "That team is actually not on scholarship here and they still grind. I just loved the fact that they do it just for them. It's not really a glory sport at all. It's all self-pride and self-goals. I just really wanted to compete in something, so I started talking to them. There was a long process to get approved to do that, but eventually once I was healthy, it was the end of my redshirt junior year and I was able to join the team finally."
Frye officially joined the program in January of 2020, opening his collegiate wrestling career versus No. 8 North Carolina. He earned his first victory five days later, pinning Gardner-Webb's Gabriel Pickett. Frye finished the year with a 1-1 record, a number that in the grand scheme of things meant very little to what he had accomplished over the previous 12 months. He worked his way back from a knee injury to find a spot in the rotation on the defensive line, before joining a Division I wrestling team midseason and registering his first career fall. The evolutionary anthropology major with a minor in biology earned a spot on the ACC Academic Honor Roll to boot.
As he became more entrenched in the wrestling program, Frye found additional aspects of the sport that were comparable to his experience on the football field. One such area was a size disparity that he needed to overcome. A defensive end in high school, Frye was moved to defensive tackle when he arrived at Duke, forcing him to battle alongside and against players that outweigh him by upwards of 50 pounds. He is listed at 255 on the Blue Devils roster, an ideal weight for a D-end, but on the interior, his task was to power through offensive linemen that run 300 pounds apiece. To adjust to such a difference, he often pulled from the tactics he uses in wrestling, where he competes in the heavyweight division, a 285-pound weight class.
In both instances, Frye acknowledges one word that wields more power than any physical attribute — leverage.
"We say in football that we want to win junction points. Junction points on the field are when two people come together for a one-on-one. Whether it's on the line, defensive back and receiver, there's a junction point and you're either going to win or lose that junction point. With wrestling, all it is is junction points. It's constant. You can do whatever you need to do to win that position; it's a position battle and a leverage battle. Really, what junction point translates to on the football field is leverage. Who has better leverage? That's all wrestling is."
Using leverage to swim under an offensive tackle or "get skinny" through a double team on his way to disrupting opposing quarterbacks has become a trademark of Frye's success. On the mat, he uses it to his advantage via impeccable balance, contorting his body to where his opponent cannot reach him. It is an exhaustive way to gain an upper hand, but Frye has practiced it to the point of second nature in both sports.
As he prepares for his final year with the Blue Devils, Frye already has his goals laid out for post-collegiate life. The fifth-year grad student who earned his degree in May of 2021 has been engulfed by competition long enough to know that his drive won't stop when he leaves Durham. His pursuit of excellence will shift gears towards another endeavor, one that has peaked his interest for years — a career in mixed martial arts.
Frye has been fascinated by professional fighting, in particular the Ultimate Fighting Championship, since he was in high school. He even dabbled in jiu-jitsu, telling his dad then that he was going to be a UFC fighter when he grew up. And Scott Frye knew when Ben said something, he meant it. Although his commitment as a two-sport student-athlete in the ACC dictates that he does not do any sparring in the offseason, both from a timing and injury-risk standpoint, Frye is excited to see what potential there is for him to step into the cage sometime in the future. When talking about that prospect, he naturally refers to the parallels between MMA competitions and wrestling.
"There's a translation from wrestling. You look at the UFC rosters. They're almost all college wrestlers. If they're not, they're straight from K-1 kickboxing or something like that. Wrestling is a combat sport, and I'm going to try it. I think I could do pretty well in it."
Until that day comes, he knows he has built a pathway to success, both within and outside of athletics, over his five years at Duke. No matter what his future holds, whether it be in the professional football ranks, in the ultimate fighting octagon or in the world of business, Frye is forever grateful for the opportunity to compete in all walks of life.
"I'm beyond thankful," he said. "I know exactly what they (Duke) did for me. This is a 40-year decision for school, at an institution like Duke which is amazing. Now I'm in grad school and I wouldn't have gotten that opportunity if I didn't come here. To be able to do two sports that I truly love and them be okay with it, that's a dream come true. It's preparing me for what I want to do after in athletics, whether it's football or fighting. I'm doing two things that will help with that. Academically, I'm getting a degree that's going to last me the rest of my life."
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In the world of collegiate athletics, it is often undersold just how extraordinary the commitment of a two-sport athlete can be. While the concept of being a part of multiple teams — enjoying the camaraderie of two different groups, training in alternative settings, constantly finding yourself in an athletic environment — may sound appealing to many while they make the transition from high school to college, the reality is that it requires a specific kind of person to handle such a balance.
Throw in the rigorous demands of an elite academic institution like Duke University on top of that, and you find a lifestyle that few would envy and even fewer could manage. It takes a distinguished combination of exceptional athletic ability and unwavering discipline in the classroom. It takes a competitor, in every sense of the word.
It takes someone like Ben Frye.
To many around him, and perhaps even if pressed himself, Frye would tell you he is a football player. The 6-foot-3, 255-pound defensive lineman enters his fifth year with the Duke program in 2021 and is looking to build off a redshirt senior season that saw him appear in all 11 games and collect 28 tackles (three for loss) with a pair of assisted sacks. After redshirting as a freshman in 2017, he has steadily increased his stats in nearly every category over the last three years and knows that a larger role is on the horizon beginning Friday, Sept. 3 in the team's season opener at Charlotte.
Frye's success at the Division I level would appear to most as, if not predictable, unsurprising. The Dublin, Ohio native was a first-team all-state selection by the Associated Press his senior season at Coffman High School, when he was also named his conference's co-defensive player of the year. Yet with all his accolades stemming from his performance on the gridiron, and not to mention his upbringing in the sport — his father, Scott, played at NAIA university Olivet Nazarene — Frye arrived at Duke with an additional love for wrestling, which he went on to pursue during his undergraduate career.
His first taste of wrestling came in eighth grade, when he decided to try out for his middle school team simply because a few of his friends did it. Although acknowledging that his parents were not fully behind the idea of their son exploring another high-contact sport, Frye committed to the tryout partly to disprove what he thought was a ridiculous notion, that something else could be more strenuous than football.
"It was one of those things where they were like, 'Wrestling is so much harder than football,' and I thought football is a tough sport," he said. "I thought I would come in and be like, 'I'll show you guys,' and it ended up changing my mind immediately. That was in middle school and was probably the hardest thing I'd ever done. I loved the challenge of it. I kind of got hooked after my first practice, just completely dead."
From then on, Frye knew he had found something that would not only keep him in shape during the offseason, but would also lend itself to the technical nature of being a defensive lineman. He found many similarities in the strength, leverage and dexterity needed to have success in each sport, and was prepared to embark on four years of high school that included both. However, he learned early that the physical nature of playing football before transitioning to wrestling shortly after takes a toll.
"I got injured my freshman and sophomore year," Frye said. "I had a pretty bad back injury, so I wasn't able to actually wrestle. I was limited on the football field those two years, but I was still around the wrestling community. Then, my junior and senior year, that's when I really started to pick things up with both."
The wrestling community is a tight-knit one that, for the most part, is built on families passing the sport down through generations. It is not always typical for a high school athlete to pick up wrestling as a hobby and break into that mold, but even while recovering from injuries, Frye maintained his connection with it.
He placed fourth in the state tournament as a junior, with obvious signs of rapid improvement that year. Frye recalls that being his first exposure to a traditional wrestling season, since his total experience up to that point was being a part of a middle school team that, as he put it, wasn't as intensive. One source of confidence was pulled from the geographic location that he was collecting wins in, as Frye was well aware of the prominent wrestling culture in his home state.
"Growing up, I knew Ohio was tough," he said. "They say that state tournament is one of the hardest tournaments in the country, even compared to all these invitation, nationally-ranked tournaments that guys go to in the offseason. The IRONMAN is considered the hardest tournament in the country — that's in Ohio. If you look at a college roster, almost 50 percent of those guys are going to be from Ohio, Iowa or Pennsylvania."
Advancing to the state semifinals in the midwest did not go unnoticed, no matter how relatively unseasoned Frye was in the sport. Following his loss, he was contacted by Virginia head coach Steve Garland, a recognition that he had not even received in football at that time in his career.
"It was my first offer and exposure talking to a college coach," Frye said. "I was like, 'This isn't even my main sport.' It was right after I'd wrestled the number one kid in the country in Ohio. I think he had pinned everybody, and I lost, but I guess I did well against him. I took him to all three periods and pushed the pace. I was surprised I got any interest after losing a match, but it was a cool experience. It was out of nowhere."
For a competitor like Frye, getting a look from a Division I program was all he needed to fully immerse himself in wrestling his senior year. He enjoyed a breakout season, putting together an incredible 49-0 record en route to the state finals. In comparison to many of the athletes he was beating, Frye was still inexperienced, but he remembers using a trust of the basics, his uncommon athleticism and an unrelenting drive that helped him overcome his lack of a wrestling background. When he suffered his first loss via takedown in that state final match, he temporarily felt that it may be time to call it a career, short as it may have been. After all, even with his meteoric rise through the wrestling ranks, Frye's first love remained football, and he was ready to spend his years in college focusing on the line of scrimmage even if it meant sacrificing time on the mat.
Of course, his competitive nature would not allow that to happen for very long. Frye redshirted his freshman season with the Blue Devils, and after seeing action in six games in 2018, he suffered another injury, this time tearing his left ACL. He endured a full recovery process and was on the field for 88 snaps over eight games as a redshirt junior, compiling nine tackles, including a three-tackle performance against 15th-ranked Notre Dame. Through that entire period, though, he kept wrestling stored in the back of his mind, often thinking back to his senior year in high school and wondering what could've been had he continued his development.
He began going to Duke matches, marveling at the effort that went into competing at such a high level. Eventually, at the end of 2019, Frye reached out to head coach Glen Lanham with an idea.
"I started talking to the wrestling coach because I would go to every match and I just loved how those guys worked so hard," he recalls. "That team is actually not on scholarship here and they still grind. I just loved the fact that they do it just for them. It's not really a glory sport at all. It's all self-pride and self-goals. I just really wanted to compete in something, so I started talking to them. There was a long process to get approved to do that, but eventually once I was healthy, it was the end of my redshirt junior year and I was able to join the team finally."
Frye officially joined the program in January of 2020, opening his collegiate wrestling career versus No. 8 North Carolina. He earned his first victory five days later, pinning Gardner-Webb's Gabriel Pickett. Frye finished the year with a 1-1 record, a number that in the grand scheme of things meant very little to what he had accomplished over the previous 12 months. He worked his way back from a knee injury to find a spot in the rotation on the defensive line, before joining a Division I wrestling team midseason and registering his first career fall. The evolutionary anthropology major with a minor in biology earned a spot on the ACC Academic Honor Roll to boot.
As he became more entrenched in the wrestling program, Frye found additional aspects of the sport that were comparable to his experience on the football field. One such area was a size disparity that he needed to overcome. A defensive end in high school, Frye was moved to defensive tackle when he arrived at Duke, forcing him to battle alongside and against players that outweigh him by upwards of 50 pounds. He is listed at 255 on the Blue Devils roster, an ideal weight for a D-end, but on the interior, his task was to power through offensive linemen that run 300 pounds apiece. To adjust to such a difference, he often pulled from the tactics he uses in wrestling, where he competes in the heavyweight division, a 285-pound weight class.
In both instances, Frye acknowledges one word that wields more power than any physical attribute — leverage.
"We say in football that we want to win junction points. Junction points on the field are when two people come together for a one-on-one. Whether it's on the line, defensive back and receiver, there's a junction point and you're either going to win or lose that junction point. With wrestling, all it is is junction points. It's constant. You can do whatever you need to do to win that position; it's a position battle and a leverage battle. Really, what junction point translates to on the football field is leverage. Who has better leverage? That's all wrestling is."
Using leverage to swim under an offensive tackle or "get skinny" through a double team on his way to disrupting opposing quarterbacks has become a trademark of Frye's success. On the mat, he uses it to his advantage via impeccable balance, contorting his body to where his opponent cannot reach him. It is an exhaustive way to gain an upper hand, but Frye has practiced it to the point of second nature in both sports.
As he prepares for his final year with the Blue Devils, Frye already has his goals laid out for post-collegiate life. The fifth-year grad student who earned his degree in May of 2021 has been engulfed by competition long enough to know that his drive won't stop when he leaves Durham. His pursuit of excellence will shift gears towards another endeavor, one that has peaked his interest for years — a career in mixed martial arts.
Frye has been fascinated by professional fighting, in particular the Ultimate Fighting Championship, since he was in high school. He even dabbled in jiu-jitsu, telling his dad then that he was going to be a UFC fighter when he grew up. And Scott Frye knew when Ben said something, he meant it. Although his commitment as a two-sport student-athlete in the ACC dictates that he does not do any sparring in the offseason, both from a timing and injury-risk standpoint, Frye is excited to see what potential there is for him to step into the cage sometime in the future. When talking about that prospect, he naturally refers to the parallels between MMA competitions and wrestling.
"There's a translation from wrestling. You look at the UFC rosters. They're almost all college wrestlers. If they're not, they're straight from K-1 kickboxing or something like that. Wrestling is a combat sport, and I'm going to try it. I think I could do pretty well in it."
Until that day comes, he knows he has built a pathway to success, both within and outside of athletics, over his five years at Duke. No matter what his future holds, whether it be in the professional football ranks, in the ultimate fighting octagon or in the world of business, Frye is forever grateful for the opportunity to compete in all walks of life.
"I'm beyond thankful," he said. "I know exactly what they (Duke) did for me. This is a 40-year decision for school, at an institution like Duke which is amazing. Now I'm in grad school and I wouldn't have gotten that opportunity if I didn't come here. To be able to do two sports that I truly love and them be okay with it, that's a dream come true. It's preparing me for what I want to do after in athletics, whether it's football or fighting. I'm doing two things that will help with that. Academically, I'm getting a degree that's going to last me the rest of my life."
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