Noel Meyer is your everyday counselor at Sartell High School. When he is not hard at work in his office, you will find him either coaching football or wrestling. When he is not working, he spends his time with his wife and daughter. But the real story begins with his wrestling career and how it built him into the man he is today. 

Wrestling has been part of Meyer’s life since kindergarten.

Meyer has a natural aggressiveness because, at a young age, his two older brothers would “beat the living crap out of me all the time!”  

So he developed this aggressiveness, and he started to enjoy wrestling with his brothers, who were four and seven years older than him. When he finally got into wrestling, he was able to wrestle kids his age and not much older than him. Meyer had a lot of success in his first years of wrestling. He shared that he didn’t lose a match until his seventh grade year. He enjoyed wrestling so much because of the success he was having. 

When he got into high school, he had a lot more success in his wrestling career. Even though his team was not very good, Meyer was a beast, being undefeated his junior year until the section finals. There was a lot of pressure on him to win duals for the team or just to win in general.

When Meyer reflects on this time of his life, he said, “So like, I was undefeated that whole year. So there [was] just a lot of pressure to win.”

When he got into college at St. John’s University, it was very different because his main sport was football, and he joined the wrestling team because they did not have a heavyweight. Also, he felt like he had something to prove to himself because in his senior year of high school, he got hurt and some of the goals he had, he did not get to achieve. One example goal he had was getting 100 wins. In college, there was not that much pressure on him to win as much as there was in high school.  

Playing football and wrestling during college really took a toll on his body. During his junior year of college, instead of wrestling, he decided to coach that year at Apollo High School. That’s where his coaching career started off. Then he went off to coach at Albany for two years, and later he went on to be an assistant coach at St. Michael-Albertville for a year.

Then he came to coach at Sartell, and he has stayed ever since. When Meyer was in eighth grade, the older kids would help coach him, and that’s how he learned a lot. When Meyer got into coaching, he didn’t want the kids to have to teach other kids. He wanted to be able to be in a room where he could truly be the expert in wrestling and help kids as much as possible. Even when he was in high school, he would sit in his teammates’ corners, coaching them and helping them out. That’s what really formed his love for coaching.

Even though Meyer loves coaching, he has to sacrifice a lot to do what he loves. It takes a lot to balance his work and his family life. When he gets home, he does not have much time to spend with his daughter unless it is on the weekends. But even then, there could be a weekend wrestling tournament. That’s what made Meyer have a lot more respect for his coaches when he was in high school and college, because they had to sacrifice a lot of things to be there for the team.