When Heather Lyke arrived at Pittsburgh as the new athletic director in 2017, she asked where the school’s Atlantic Coast Conference championship hardware was displayed. The answers were underwhelming.
Turns out, there wasn’t much of it since joining the league in 2013—the ’13–14 wrestling team was the lone Pitt team to have won an ACC title to that point. As for the trophy commemorating that feat? Lyke went searching for it and found it in the “wrestling dungeon” basement of Fitzgerald Field House, a relic built in 1951. It was sitting in a volunteer assistant coach’s office.
“The one ACC championship trophy is on an end table in a tiny office,” Lyke recalls. “I was mortified at the lack of visible pride.”
