Dan McCool grew up in Clarion, Iowa, attending Clarion High School, which had a wrestling program since the 1920-21 school year. 

McCool got to experience a tradition-rich program that produced state and national champions and one Olympic gold medalist. The program was led by Dale Brand, a state champion at Fort Dodge and Cornell College's first NCAA champion, who built the Cowboys into a perennial winner. 

McCool started writing stories in kindergarten, a prelude to what would become a lifetime of writing. His first stories were from the Little Leagues games in town, as his older brother was a co-director of the summer program. 

He later wrote about punkinball as he waited for an opportunity to write about wrestling. 

After graduating from high school in 1978, McCool began his 31-year career in newspaper by serving as sports editor of the Knoxville Journal-Express in Knoxville, Iowa. 

After two years, he took a job as assistant sports editor at the Dickinson Press in Dickinson, North Dakota. There was plenty of high school wrestling in the area and he helped with the coverage of a college program in town that was in the midst of having significant success. 

In 1982 McCool had a chance to get back to his home state and serve as the last sports editor of the Cedar Falls Record, absorbed into the Waterloo Courier one year later. 

Dan had a meeting with outstanding high school reporter Chuck Burdick, who helped McCool land a correspondent's job with the Des Moines Register in 1983. His job was to be temporary covering home football games for the University of Northern Iowa. McCool wound up getting to cover the Panthers strong football program as well as helping out with other sports. 

Eventually, the Register gave him the dream position of covering the state of Iowa in high school wrestling, which included all of the state tournament coverage and doing all the of the rankings for the state. Dan also covered several NCAA Division I and Division III national tournaments. He also did high school football, girls and boys soccer, swimming and baseball. 

He always felt it was the most fun covering wrestling and they paid him to do it. McCool covered gold-medal winning efforts at state, national and Olympic levels during his career. 

Dan left the Register in 2009, embarking on a project of writing a book about the history of high school wrestling in Iowa. Reaching For The Stars was a published account of teams and individuals from the tournament. In addition to place-winners from the first state tournament and championship round results from the beginning of time in Iowa, it included personal interest stories from significant individuals while also listing wrestlers from Iowa who became national champions. 

Dan also helped Hall of Fame Coach Bob Darrah with a book titled Bobby D: "It's not the destination, it's the journey. Ready? Wrestle!" 

He also contracted with a South Carolina firm to write a book "A History of Wrestling In Iowa : Growing Gold". 

The Iowa Wrestling Coaches and Officials Association awarded him the inaugural Dan McCool Media Award. 

On a winter weekend you can find Dan McCool sitting at Mat side taking pictures of wrestling. He views this as paying back to the sport that has been so good to him. 

Dan and his wife Diane reside in West Des Moines, Iowa.