AMES, Iowa — During their road trip to California, the Iowa State wrestling team came away with wins over Arizona State and California Baptist. But their biggest win of the weekend was helping a parent find his lost one-year-old son.
The team was eating pizza in the hotel lobby Sunday night when they encountered a man looking for his child. From there, the team took action and frantically searched in and around the hotel.
"All our guys were, you know, in the background, and I said, 'let's go,'" said Head Coach Kevin Dresser. "Everybody hit floors and parking ramps and parking garages. It was a mad scramble. It seemed like a lot longer than 20 minutes, but I guess that's what it was."
Fittingly, it was senior Julien Broderson, who happens to be a father himself, that found the boy in the hotel parking garage and reunited him with his dad.
"I'd went down to the parking garage and then made my way up to where he was," Broderson said. "He was on the second-floor parking garage and in my head, as a parent, I think maybe if this happened to me two years ago, I would have been just kind of looking around like normal, but I was on a mission to find him and I'm really glad that we found him."