Voting Open for WIN Magazine/Culture House Dan Hodge Trophy, Presented by ASICS
NEWTON, Iowa — WIN Magazine has opened the voting for the 2024 WIN Magazine/Culture House Dan Hodge Trophy, presented by ASICS.
The five finalists are the four undefeated NCAA Division I national champions — Levi Haines (157, Penn State), Parker Keckeisen (184, Northern Iowa), Aaron Brooks (197, Penn State) and Greg Kerkvliet (HWT, Penn State) — and Penn State’s Carter Starocci, who was 17-2 at 174 pounds with his only two losses being injury defaults at the Big Ten tournament.
The Hodge Trophy Fan Vote starts today at WIN-magazine.com and goes until Friday, March 29 at 5 pm CST. The winner of the fan vote gets five first-place Hodge votes.
The Hodge Trophy Voting Committee is made up of all past winners of the award, each getting one vote for each year they won the Hodge; several national wrestling media members; several retired college coaches from different regions and a representative of each national wrestling organization.
The winner will be announced on Monday, April 1 at 12:00 pm CST.
Long known as the “Heisman Trophy of wrestling” and given to the sport’s most dominant collegian, the criteria for the award includes a wrestler’s record, dominance/bonus-point percentage, quality of competition and sportsmanship.
Haines, a sophomore, went 23-0 and scored bonus points in 65% of his matches.
The senior Starocci, a four-time NCAA champ, also had a 65% bonus-point percentage.
Keckeisen, a junior, finished with the most wins of the finalists, going 31-0 with a bonus-point percentage of 90%.
Four-time champ Brooks, a senior, edged out Keckeisen for the highest bonus-point percentage of the group, at 91% in his 22-0 campaign.
Kerkvliet is a senior who finished 20-0 and had a 70% bonus-point percentage.
The award is named after Dan Hodge, the late three-time NCAA champion who wrestled at Oklahoma from 1955-1957. Hodge went 46-0 over his three-year career, pinning 36 of 46 opponents and was never taken down in college. He is still the only wrestler ever to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
WIN Magazine will officially present the award at the team’s spring wrestling banquet and again publicly at a football game this fall.
For more information on the award, as well as a list of past winners and the announcement story from each year, go to WIN-magazine.com.
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