The Pitt Bond of Brotherhood
Josh Rowntree
Matt (A&S ’13) and Tyler (BUS ’15) Wilps are separated by the entire country, divided by time and by lives that have professionally gone in remarkably different directions.
But the two brothers, straight out of Collier Township in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, are undeniably woven together through their love of their sport (wrestling), each other and the legacy they built on at the University of Pittsburgh.
Matt and Tyler got into the sport thanks to their dad, Jeff (A&S ’82), a Pitt wrestler himself from 1979 to 1982.
“I wasn’t really a highly sought-after recruit, but I started hitting my stride my senior year of high school,” recalls Matt, the oldest of four Wilps children and a Chartiers Valley High School graduate. “Pitt called me up, it was close to home and my dad went there.
“[My dad] definitely liked Pitt and the thought of [my] staying close to home. He was always a Pitt fan, so that for sure made me want to go there.”
Jeff, however, wasn’t overly pushy when it came to sports. He wanted his children to have quality educations first and foremost. But when Matt and Tyler developed into college wrestling material, and Jeff conveniently purchased a house on Iowa Street in Oakland, the path seemed set for the brothers to take their talents on the mat to the Fitzgerald Field House.
“The house was a little bit of a walk from the field house, but it wasn’t bad,” says Matt, a two-time All-American with the Panthers from 2008 to 2013. “It was on north campus, so it was pretty easy getting there. I was living with a lot of my teammates, so that was really cool.”
For a time, one of those teammates was Tyler.
“It was like a generational thing,” adds Tyler, the second of the four Wilps children. “I lived there, and my brother lived there with his friends. We had about eight wrestlers in that house, plus some occasional random folks. We definitely had the ‘wrestling house.’”
The two had a brotherly bond, of course, but their strongest connection developed during Tyler’s first-year season. The duo both took a redshirt year in 2010-11 and wrestled on their own in open competitions.
It was a family affair. It was cool to be a part of that in general. It speaks to what Pitt is: a family.Tyler Wilps (BUS ’15)
“That was a big growth year for me, because I was starting to get good and learning how to win,” says Matt, who graduated from Pitt with a double major in economics and psychology. “For Ty, it was his first year in college. The lineup was pretty strong when he came in, so he took a redshirt [year]. We used that year as a growth year.”
For Tyler, a situation that could have left him a bit isolated as a noncompeting wrestler was anything but, in large part thanks to Matt.
“I feel so lucky to have that bond and brotherhood,” Tyler says. “To go through that together—it’s good to have someone in your corner. He was basically my coach my freshman year. All of those guys on that team are my brothers in some sense, but to do it with Matt was awesome. It adds another layer to our relationship now.”
And that year, without question, benefited both greatly. Tyler finished his career 87-31 on the mat and made a trip to the NCAA championship match, competing at 174 pounds.
“It was what I was working for and what it all culminated in,” he says.
Tyler still laments losing in the final 10 seconds of the match. But the experience stays with him to this day as an overall positive one.
He also remembers fondly the experiences away from the mat, the nights in the Wilps’ “wrestling house” and the road trips with teammates.
For Matt, those experiences stand out more than his career record of 129-37 and his three trips to the NCAA championships.
“It’s got to be just hanging out with the guys, the team,” he says. “The team environment, combined with the support staff, coaches, weight training staff, trainers—I still talk to some of them to this day.”
He’s particularly fond of a prepractice ritual the team would go through.
“We’d start practice at 3:30 p.m. and everyone, the whole team, would show up an hour early because we’d play dodgeball,” he says. “We’d steal volleyballs from the volleyball team and play dodgeball. We’d be beaning each other with them. It got the energy flowing, got us all warmed up.
“When I say that was the highlight, it really was—those little games with the boys.”
While the two were tenacious competitors in their wrestling days, they’ve moved on from that life. Each dabbled in coaching at Pitt for a year after college, including a year in which Matt officially coached Tyler as a member of Pitt’s staff.
But both decided to move on to much different things.
Tyler went to medical school at Temple University, then moved to San Diego, California, for his residency in orthopaedics. He also was married recently to a fellow Chartiers Valley grad, Mallory Mack, with whom he reconnected after college.
While he admits that this is the most distant he’s felt from the sport in his life, he still keeps tabs on the Pitt wrestling program and those following in his footsteps.
“The distance doesn’t lessen wrestling’s impact or how much I love the sport, but I just got busy doing the next thing,” he says.
Matt, meanwhile, is living in Charlotte, North Carolina, and using his athleticism in a relatively obscure line of work.
“I’m still changing tires, man,” he jokes.
Matt was unsure what to do when his year of coaching was up. That’s when he met Devin Dietrich, who can best be described as a matchmaker between Pitt wrestlers and the automotive racing industry.
“He’s the mastermind behind getting all of the Pitt wrestlers down [to Charlotte],” Matt says. “There were at least four Pitt wrestlers he got down there.
“The first time I heard about him was my junior year. I heard, ‘There’s this guy who is a big NASCAR fan, and he said you guys can go down and try to be a pit crew.’ Everyone sort of chuckled and was like, ‘Yeah, who wants to do that?’”
NASCAR pit crews typically pull in former athletes. Many football players work on the crews as well as some wrestlers, like fellow Pitt All-American Zac Thomusseit (CGS ’13), who was in a similar boat as Matt after college.
“We kind of just got sold on the dream,” Matt says. “Me, Zac and [fellow former Pitt wrestler] Donnie Tasser (A&S ’13) all moved down in 2015.
“We did a little combine, almost like the NFL stuff. We had to do all these drills, just to test if we were in shape, if we were coachable. They had us hang a couple of tires and do some of the drills for NASCAR. But they don’t expect much. No one else grows up doing this stuff.”
Almost a decade later, Matt is still going through the grind that is life in racing. There’s a lot of travel involved, moving from city to city during the season. He’s also worked on teams for various drivers and on different circuits of the sport.
That hard work paid off in 2021, when Matt was on the pit crew for driver Michael McDowell when he claimed an unexpected Daytona 500 victory.
“Yeah, I got a Daytona 500 win,” Matt says, seemingly still in disbelief. “It was crazy and I totally didn’t expect it. I was going through a positional change. I was going through some adversity. I was put on a different car, and the first race of the year, my first race as a gas man, we win the Daytona 500.”
Matt has picked up a few of other victories and is now working with driver Hailie Deegan on the NASCAR Xfinity Series and also working some with Jimmie Johnson.
“I wouldn’t have seen this coming for Matt, that’s for sure,” says Tyler with a laugh. “But he’s been doing it for 10 years now. It’s been cool. Every year or two I go to a race and it’s good fun. It fits Matt. He’s always been a hands-on, use-your-body type of guy.”
The duality of their experience and training in college is surely a delight of their father. Matt is using the training he acquired through wrestling, while Tyler has gone the more academic route in his profession.
Both have found a way to succeed and thrive and to keep the Wilps connection to Pitt strong. And they aren’t alone.
Their younger brother, Noah (A&S ’19), wrestled at Pitt for a year, and, their sister, Claire (SHRS ’22), is currently living in the family’s Oakland house and studying to be a pathology technician at Pitt.
And now, despite the distance between Matt and Tyler and the busy and different lives they lead, the two share a deeper appreciation for their time together, for their bond with the University that helped to build them and for the connections they made along the way.
“It’s unique,” Tyler says. “I’m grateful to have had the experience. When Matt and I were on the team, we basically had four sets of brothers. It was a family affair. It was cool to be a part of that in general. It speaks to what Pitt is: a family.”