Garfield graduate Keegan Sell’s varsity career in both wrestling and football has been etched into the school record books. He is now hitting the reset button when he continues his football career at Grand Valley State University this fall.
“I am super excited,” Sell told The Weekly Villager on June 11. “I am a little bit nervous. It is a new place about six hours away so it is going to different and it will be a whole new experience to meet new people. Experiencing college football has always been a dream of mine ever since I was a kid, it is like starting all over again.”
For the Grand Valley State University commit, it all began when he brought home a wrestling sign-up form. He said his father was a huge WWE wrestling fan and Sell said that he originally thought participating in youth wrestling would be like that.
He soon realized that he was a little off base.
“I remember it being really tough,” he said. “It is just two hours of hardness and there are hardly any stops and it is very physical and it might be more mental than football with how hard it is but it was definitely rough.”
Sell also started playing football because he was a huge fan of the sport and started competing in flag football. Unlike flag football, Sell could be pretty physical even in youth wrestling but he struggled flag football because he was not allowed to put his hands on his opponent.
“I don’t think I was very good at flag football,” he acknowledged “I started pushing and got a little too aggressive and excited. I was ready to start tackling.”
Sell’s two primary positions were cornerback and linebacker but once he was old enough to play tackle football, he became a natural fit as a linebacker because he wanted to be involved where most of the action was at the line of scrimmage.
According to Sell, competing in football also taught him that it was okay to rely on the help of others.
“I definitely think I didn’t depend on people as much as I did when I was younger,” he said. “I don’t think I thought it was a team sport but now that I am older and see much easier a person does on a team or a field, it really shows you how much you are just one little part of a team or a well-oiled machine.”
As physically demanding as it was to wrestle and play football, Sell found that he could apply the same techniques to both sports and it made him a better athlete.
He said that he did not know where he would be as an athlete because he did not compete in both sports in all four years of his high school career.
“They are probably two of the most physical sports you can do in high school so just being tougher, it makes you stronger and in ways that people cannot comprehend,” he noted. “There are muscles you can get for wrestling that you cannot get from other things so ittranslates over to football.”
After playing on the 2021 football team that made the Division V regional semifinal and advancing to the Division III state semifinal in wrestling during his sophomore campaign, Sell made huge strides in his junior season.
Although the football team’s season ended in the regional quarterfinal, Sell dominated in wrestling his senior season, becoming one of two Garfield wrestlers to win the first individual state wrestling championships in school history alongside teammate Hunter Andel.
After Sell’s triumphant junior wrestling season, he said a lot more colleges began noticing him and he collected several more offers, some only for wrestling, some for football and some to be a dual-sport athlete in college.
After the end of his senior football season when the team once again made it to the regional semifinal before bowing out against Perry, Sell committed to Grand Valley State to play football.
He said that the culture at Grand Valley State University reminded him a lot of Garfield’s culture.
“The culture, want to get better and improve and the family aspect of it is really close up there and it is something I really want to be a part of to make myself a better person for the next four to five years or however long I am up there,” he said.
Sell wrapped up his high school career by capturing another Division III state wrestling crown and graduates as the only two-time state champion in school history and a member of one of the winningest senior classes in football.
“God truly blessed me with the year I had,” he said. “It is truly remarkable and there is nothing else for me to say except that I will never forget this year. I am sure not many people forget their senior year but there was still something special about this year.”
