Texas is not where Bo Nickal was born. Really, he didn’t even grow up there. Nickal was born in Rifle, Colorado, a small town whose name sounds more like a fever dream than a hometown. As a young child, he moved to Wyoming, where he began wrestling at the age of five or six. In the fifth grade, he moved to Rio Rancho, New Mexico. He had already lived in more places than most teenagers twice his age by the time he started high school. After that, there was another relocation—to Allen, Texas, where the true story starts.
Located in a suburb north of Dallas, Allen High School is the kind of place where religious and athletic traditions are taken seriously on Friday nights. While still in eighth grade in New Mexico, Nickal was already a wrestler with enough raw talent to make the varsity team when he arrived as a freshman. That year, he had finished second in the state tournament, which would have seemed like a victory to most young wrestlers. It appears that Nickal saw it more as unresolved business.
He also had a rough first year at Allen. Given the size and level of competition in Texas high school wrestling, his second-place finish at the state tournament is no small feat. However, Nickal had no intention of staying in second. He won every state championship after his sophomore year. After that, Texas won three consecutive state titles, a run that is hard to fully comprehend without knowing how hotly contested that bracket usually is. During this time, he was also competing internationally; as a junior, he finished fifth in freestyle at the 2013 U17 World Championships, indicating that even at sixteen or seventeen, this kid’s potential was somewhere most people hadn’t considered.
The way Nickal himself recounts those years at Allen is intriguing. He did not reach for the individual awards or the trophies when asked about his favorite program memory. He spoke about his teammates, the trips, the late nights, and the connections that became lifelong friendships. That has an authentic quality that defies the stereotype of the cold-blooded, cunning rival he would eventually come to be known as. It’s possible that Allen’s surroundings influenced more than just his style. It might have completely changed the way he views competition.
Nickal’s record was 183 wins, 7 losses, and 131 pins by the time he graduated from Allen High School in 2014. According to the rankings, he was the ninth-best wrestler in the country by weight. When stated clearly, those figures are practically ridiculous. Additionally, he had committed to one of the most prestigious wrestling programs in American college history, Pennsylvania State University, where he would go on to win the Big Ten Athlete of the Year award, the Dan Hodge Trophy, and three NCAA Division I national championships. Without a foundation, none of that is possible. An important component of that foundation was Allen.
He has admitted as much. When asked if wrestling at a large program like Allen helped him get ready for college, Nickal gave credit to the coaching, the quality of his training partners, and the travel schedule. His words, “I was really lucky to be a part of that program,” didn’t sound like the kind of polished, practiced expressions of gratitude that athletes occasionally give in front of an audience. It sounded as though the speaker truly meant it.
It’s difficult to ignore how infrequently this aspect of his story is shared. There is ample documentation of the Penn State years. The UFC career has garnered a lot of interest. However, the Allen chapter—the freshman moving to a new state, finishing second, and then deciding never to place second again—seems to be where the obsession with competition became more intense and persistent. Bo Nickal did not become well-known on the Allen High School mat. He became unrelenting at that point. And in retrospect, that distinction is very important.
