To cap his coaching career, Penn’s Roger Reina is helping play host to the NCAA wrestling championships

Roger Reina, the winningest coach in Penn wrestling history, is looking to put an exclamation mark on his storied career at the NCAA wrestling championships. Penn is hosting the tournament alongside Drexel and PHL Sports this Thursday through Saturday at the Wells Fargo Center.

“It’s going to be a big reunion for Penn wrestling alumni, family, and friends, and a big celebration of everything that we’re about,” Reina said.

Reina is concluding his second stint as the head of the Quakers program. From 1986 to 2005, he amassed 205 wins, eight Ivy League championships, and four Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association titles. In 2015, he returned to Penn to serve in athletic administration before returning as the wrestling program’s coach in 2017 — adding 53 wins to an already illustrious career.

After wrestling for Penn from 1980 to 1984, Reina took an assistant’s role with the program despite having no aspirations to coach long-term. Just two years later, he became the youngest Division I wrestling coach at age 24.

A visit to an old business law professor led to Reina staying as long as he did.

“There was a professor here at the time who I became good friends with,” Reina said. “I took his class, and his name was Nick Constan. … He really encouraged me to think about aspects of the job that I wasn’t sure I could excel at.

“One was in recruiting. One of the assistant [athletic directors] at the time was like, ‘I’m not sure how you’re going to be in a recruiting situation and in someone’s living room’. Nick was like, ‘actually, that’s where I think you’re going to excel.’ It made me gain confidence along the way.”

Reina will serve as the “head coach emeritus” at Penn next season as part of an innovative succession plan announced last year. Matt Valenti will assume the role of head coach. Valenti, who wrestled for Penn, is the program’s career leader in victories with 137.

On every recruiting visit, Reina drives home the core values of Penn’s athletic program: character first, aim big, humility, enjoyment, and community matters.

“We’re going to act with character,” Reina said. “We’re going to aim really big, but we’re going to do it with humility, and we’re going to enjoy it along the way. And our community really matters to us. It’s really how these five core values weave a fabric that’s really unique to Penn.”

During Reina’s break from coaching, he served as the senior athletic director for external affairs. Under the athletic director at the time, Grace Calhoun, Reina worked extensively with TeamUp brand consulting to focus on those values. The team underwent a yearlong process that consisted of “well over 1,000″ interviews with students, alumni, coaches, administrators, and fans.

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Reina said he bounced the ideas off anyone who would listen. One of those people was Valenti, who will soon be tasked with maintaining those values in the wrestling program.

“Those core values didn’t just come out of thin air,” Valenti said. “They have been present in this program for decades. The blood, sweat, and tears that you put in this [wrestling] room behind me. You never forget about that, right?”

Fred Popp, the founder of TeamUp, noted that Penn was the only program he worked with that highlighted humility as a core value. This was no surprise for Reina.

“The humility of being a student-athlete here is extremely challenging,” Reina said. “Competing at the Division I level, the academic challenges and opportunities at Penn. There’s this idea of reinventing yourself, and Penn is a place where you’re kind of forced to reinvent yourself in a lot of different ways.”

Reina has long been able to understand his team on a personal level.

As a Penn alum, this comes easily. He lived in the Quad, a castle-like 19th century dormitory that houses the majority of first-year students. He balanced the academic rigor of an Ivy League education with wrestling at the Division I level, and he dealt with career uncertainty out of college.

Mountaineering has connected him even further with his team, allowing him to relate to the physical and mental exhaustion wrestlers face every day.

“Mountaineering, climbing — these kind of activities require you to suffer to attain certain objectives,” Reina said. “Wrestling is very much the same way. You have to suffer. You have to suffer intense workouts. You have to suffer in not having the ability to do a lot of things that other college students do. Suffer some of your wants to be able to accomplish something even bigger.”

Reina’s mother was raised in Montana, so he grew up “running around the Rockies” when visiting family out West. He started climbing when he was a young adult, but he first “caught the bug” for alpine mountaineering after scaling Mount Rainier 20 years ago.

Since then, Reina has continued to “aim big.” He has scaled 19,000-foot mountains in Ecuador and Bolivia. In retirement, he has his eyes set on Mount Everest in Nepal.

Before taking on the highest mountain in the world, though, Reina is looking to conquer the NCAA championships for the final time. Penn has seven wrestlers competing in the first round. Freshman Cross Wasilewski is the program’s highest seed, ranked No. 9 at 149 pounds.

“There were two major events that I wanted to host here during this second tenure as head coach,” Reina said. “One was our conference championships, the EIWAs, which we hosted in ‘23 and the second was the NCAA championship. I’m thrilled that we’re hosting this, it’s a combination of a lot of things coming together again within the city to be able to support this.”