About once a week, Iowa women’s wrestling associate head coach Gary Mayabb gives an extended statement before the Hawkeyes begin practice.

His statement is rarely about the sport of wrestling. Once, he talked about how 94 percent of female executives played a sport. Another time, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, he spoke to his team about King’s dream and the legacy that he left.

“It’s not always about a psychology piece or training piece, but so many times the lessons are given to us,” Mayabb said. “Not necessarily about wrestling, but again, it reflects back to what we are here for — people, the relationships that we build.”

Mayabb joined the Iowa women’s wrestling program in May 2022 after he got a call from head coach Clarissa Chun, who asked him to apply for the job.

Chun and Mayabb worked together at USA Wrestling from 2017-21, albeit in different programs — Mayabb was the manager of greco-roman Wrestling, while Chun was the women’s national team assistant coach.

But when Chun became Iowa’s first women’s wrestling head coach in November 2021, she thought Mayabb would be the perfect complement to her coaching style.

“Coach Mayabb is great with culture building,” Chun said. “He has a background in sports psychology. As a stats guy, he’s very pragmatic and just so different from me that I felt like he was a great addition to this staff.”

Chun and Mayabb’s different styles, along with assistant coach Tonya Verbeek’s experience with the Canadian National Team, gives the Hawkeye women’s wrestlers a rounded coaching perspective throughout practice.

“They all bring different things to the table,” women’s wrestler Kylie Welker said of the coaching staff. “Coach Mayabb analyzes things, he’s a very statistical type of guy. You throw out a history fact at him and he’ll have a whole entire speech about it.”

Mayabb has a long history in wrestling — he’s been involved in the sport his entire life.

He competed for Central Missouri from 1980-83, where he was an NCAA qualifier and named the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association Most Outstanding Wrestler in 1983. He also qualified for the Olympic Trials four times in 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992.

After graduation, Mayabb spent 32 years as a collegiate wrestling official — including 11 years as a Big Ten official from 2006-17.

His tenure as a Big Ten official provided him with multiple trips to Carver-Hawkeye Arena. He saw Iowa fans’ passion for wrestling firsthand in Iowa City, which convinced him to take a job with the Hawkeyes.

“I’ve also had the fortune to officiate in Carver, and when you’re doing that, then you see the fans’ passion, those kinds of things,” Mayabb said. “… You can develop wrestling here at a high level because the people are already preset for it.”

During his officiating career, Mayabb also coached Missouri’s Cadet and Junior Greco national teams from 1986-2016. He also coached at two high schools in Kansas City, Oak Park and Staley, leading them to seven Missouri state team championships.

Whether he’s officiating or coaching, Mayabb said the sport of wrestling always comes back to the people.

“You hopefully run into and get to travel with like-minded, hardworking individuals that are willing to cooperate and collaborate and create friendships and bonds that literally last the rest of your life,” Mayabb said. “And most of it is centered around that the work is so hard, there’s no way to do it by yourself. Wrestling is perfect for that because you can’t do it by yourself.”

Before joining the Hawkeyes, Mayabb didn’t have any experience coaching women’s wrestlers. But he wanted to jump at the chance to join the first-ever Power Five women’s wrestling program.

“The Chinese have a saying that ‘You live in exciting times,’” Mayabb said. “And I don’t know that there’s more exciting times right now in our sport of wrestling than on the women’s side. There’s just so much happening, so many things, and the sport is growing so fast.”

The Iowa women’s wrestling program will officially start competition in the 2023-24 season, but a lot of Hawkeyes — like Welker — have their sights set on the Olympics.

And Mayabb is hoping to help his wrestlers realize their vision.

“We get to talk to our athletes about a vision statement — ‘Where where do you plan on being?’” Mayabb said. “Technically, we’re on the young side to get to Paris [in 2024]. But we could be almost at the perfect age to go to L.A. for the games there [in 2028]. But do you have the vision of where you would be? … if you want to be in L.A. at the Olympic Games, that’s a pretty amazing piece of vision, and every day has to be intentional.”