Mother and Son Take Different Roads Into Same Hall of Fame

BY BRIAN CARSON

Some family stories take a while to understand.

Nic Bedelyon grew up in a wrestling family. His father took him to the gym. The coaches and wrestlers around him became names he heard around the house and in the wrestling room. His cousin, Joe Daubert, had already won a state title, and there was a video of it in the family history, the thing a young wrestler watches until desire feels inherited.

His mother was there, too. She saw the wins, the losses, and the way he carried both. She knew when he was being too hard on himself because mothers know these things before anyone else. When he lost, she told him, in the special language of mothers, that the world had not ended.

“Growing up, it was just my dad taking us to wrestling,” Bedelyon said. “And trust me, my mom didn’t miss a match. If I lost, my mom was okay. I was very hard on myself, and she was just, ‘It’s not the end of the world.’”

Years later, he found out something else about her.

She had her own legs, her own lungs, her own stubbornness. Before she was the calm voice after a bad match, Amy Elsesser was part of the 1986 Chief Logan girls' cross country team that won a PIAA title. She finished second in District 6 Class AA and 12th at the PIAA Championships as a junior.

Her son did not fully understand the size of that until much later.

“I didn’t even realize she got 12th in the state as a junior,” Bedelyon said. “I think it’s crazy, and she never really talked about it.”

That seems about right. Children rarely understand their parents as athletes. They know them as the people who drive the car, find the socks, make sure the shoes are packed, and say something reasonable when nobody wants to hear it. Then time does what it does. The old results surface. The stories gain weight.

Now, mother and son are entering the Mifflin County Sports Hall of Fame as members of the same 2026 class. Bedelyon goes in for a wrestling career that began at Indian Valley, carried him to Kent State and later into coaching. Elsesser goes in as part of that Chief Logan team, which still carries the permanence of a state title almost 40 years later.

The induction ceremony is Saturday, beginning at 5 p.m. at the Birch Hill Event Center in Burnham.

It’s a rare thing: mother and son in the same class. Bedelyon knows it. His mother, he said, reacted the way quiet people sometimes do when the spotlight finds them.
“Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing,” she told him, laughing at the thought of an article about a mother and son going into the Hall of Fame together.

Bedelyon laughed about it, too. The meaning wasn’t lost on him.

“I think it’s awesome,” he said. “I think it’s super special. What mother and son in their area get to say they get to go into the Hall of Fame together?”

There’s something fitting in that. Hall of Fame stories are often built around old scores, medals, and brackets. This one has those things. Bedelyon earned them. At Indian Valley from 2004 to 2007, he went 123-14, won three District 6 titles, won two Northwest Regional titles and placed three times at the PIAA Championships, finishing fourth, fifth and second.

At Kent State, he became the third wrestler in program history to be a two-time All-American. He placed eighth in 2008 and sixth in 2012. He won 113 career matches, sixth most in program history. He qualified for the NCAA Championships four times, reached four MAC finals and won two MAC titles.

Those are serious numbers. They stand up straight on the page.

The better story happens when the numbers soften a little and become family. That sounds like a son teasing his dad a little, one of the small, permitted joys of family life. It sounds like a man recognizing, maybe later than he expected, where part of himself came from.

“I always tell people I got my athleticism from my mom,” he said.

He believes he got something else from her.

“My mom, that’s probably where I get my stubbornness from,” he said.

Stubbornness is not the worst gift an athlete can inherit. In wrestling, it might be close to essential. A wrestler can have strength, balance, technique, and good lungs. Sooner or later, he is going to need the unreasonable part of himself that refuses to give ground.

Cross country asks for the same thing in a different language. It asks a runner to keep going when the body begins making arguments that sound convincing.

Bedelyon understands that now. He ran cross country himself and remembers his first race well enough to still feel it. He said he ran his first race at the BVI in Reedsville and gave it everything he had.

“I couldn’t talk,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was because I’m the type of person, when I do something, it’s all in.”

His mother and grandmother laughed with the recognition of people who knew exactly what had happened.
“No wonder my mom didn’t like this,” he remembered thinking.”

Few tributes to cross country are more honest than that.

Cross country is a funny sport because, from a distance, it can look peaceful. A line of runners goes off across a field. Then everyone waits. The course disappears around trees and bends and small climbs. Parents stand with folded arms. Coaches squint into the distance.

Then the runners return, spread out and changed.

The face tells the story first. The last half-mile removes all ceremony.

Wrestling removes ceremony faster. The whistle blows and the room shrinks. There is the other wrestler. The mat. The clock. The lungs. The hands.

Whatever a wrestler has brought with him, he must use it now.

Bedelyon had plenty. He had names around him that tied him to Mifflin County wrestling before he had done enough to make his own. Joe Daubert was his cousin and later his head coach. Charlie Roselle, Kenny Whitsel, Joe Heller, and Rob “Meatball” Ruby were among the names he mentioned when talking about the wrestling world that shaped him.

“I was surrounded by these Mifflin County legends growing up as a kid,” Bedelyon said. “It’s really special.”

His brother, Tyler, pushed him. Bedelyon said the two competed at everything, from board games to PlayStation.

“My brother’s also a big reason because we were competing all the time,” Bedelyon said. “If it was a board game, if it was outside, if it was PlayStation, we were always competing. I give a lot of credit to him as well.”

This is how athletic families often work. They don’t always make speeches about excellence. They turn the backyard and the living room into contests. They make effort seem normal. They make losing irritating enough that a child starts looking for a way around it.

Then the years stack up.

Indian Valley is no longer the same name on the schedule. Chief Logan is part of the county’s athletic memory. The races and matches are gone, though not entirely. They remain in clippings, medals, old team photographs, and the stories grandmothers tell grandkids who are not yet old enough to hear them properly.

That’s the nice thing about a local Hall of Fame. It lets a county gather up what time has scattered. It takes a mother’s cross country season and a son’s wrestling career and places them in the same room. It says these things are worth remembering here, by people who know the roads, the gyms, the school colors and the family names.

For Bedelyon, the honor stretches beyond one career. He will go in with his mother. He will go in with Daubert. He will go in with some of the names that helped pull him toward the sport.

“It’s awesome,” Bedelyon said. “When you get older, this isn’t something you think about when you’re young. It means a lot to go in with my head coach, Joe Daubert, who’s my cousin.”

That made the honor feel like something closer to a reunion.

“My dad would always talk about Joe winning a state title,” Bedelyon said. “I grew up watching a video of Joe winning states, and I just remembered that was what I wanted.”

Not many get this kind of evening. Not many get to sit there while one family’s athletic past folds over itself so neatly. Not many sons get to look across the room and see their mother honored as more than the person who packed the car, sat in the bleachers and steadied them after losses.

Not many mothers get to see a son honored after all those long nights when he carried losses too heavily and she had to remind him that life was still waiting outside the gym.

For one night, Amy Elsesser will stand with a state championship team from 1986, a group that ran well enough together for the result to last almost four decades.

For one night, Nic Bedelyon will stand with the wrestlers, coaches and county names that made him want something difficult.

Somewhere in that room will be the greater truth of it.

A mother ran. A son wrestled. Time passed. The county remembered.