Rutgers Adds Former Don Bosco Wrestling Standout Kelly Dunnigan for His Final Collegiate Season

Rutgers head wrestling coach Scott Goodale has added former Don Bosco Prep standout Kelly Dunnigan through the transfer portal. Kelly recently announced that he will compete in his fifth and final season in the Big Ten Conference as a Scarlet Knight following four seasons at the University of Pennsylvania.

Returning Home Through the Portal

In transferring from an Ivy League school back home to Rutgers after four successful seasons, Dunnigan follows a similar path as Brett Ungar, who committed to Rutgers last month after a productive career at Cornell.

State Finals Built the Foundation

Dunnigan began his high school career at Bergen Catholic High School, where he competed as a freshman before transferring to Don Bosco Prep.

In three seasons at Don Bosco, Dunnigan compiled a 62-14 (.816) record. After a sophomore season that ended with a fourth-place finish in the state championships, as a junior at 113 pounds, he reached the state finals in Atlantic City. As a senior at 132 pounds, Dunnigan returned to the state finals, though pandemic restrictions moved the event from Atlantic City to Phillipsburg High School.

"It was nothing like the atmosphere that I experienced the prior year at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City,” said Dunnigan

The Magic of Atlantic City and Chasing a State Title

“Competing there was the best,” Dunnigan continued. “My dad would take me and my brothers down to Atlantic City for the state championships every year growing up throughout elementary and middle school. I knew that I eventually wanted to be in the state finals match one day. So, when I placed in my sophomore year, wrestling to the third place match I said to myself, ‘next year I’m going to be in the final match wrestling for the championship on Sunday.’

“It’s still probably the coolest match I’ve wrestled in to this day and probably the biggest crowd I’ve ever wrestled in front of to this day. There’s nothing really like it.”

In that state finals bout, Dunnigan dropped a hard-fought 6-3 decision to Tyler Klinsky of Middletown North, a wrestler he had beaten earlier in the year and who went on to an All-American career at Rider.

Learning Through Adversity at Penn

At Penn, Dunnigan competed primarily in open competitions since he was behind several All-Americans in a stacked Penn lineup, where he compiled a 47-21 (.692) record. After registering a 7-5 record as a freshman, Dunnigan took a gap year in 2022-23 before posting a 16-4 mark in an injury-shortened redshirt sophomore 2023-24 season. During his final two seasons, Dunnigan went 8-5 and 16-8, respectively.

“My freshman year I didn’t really start but I got to wrestle in a few matches,” Dunnigan recalled. “Then I took the gap year and that gap year I thought was really beneficial for me. I had top guys in the room to train with. It was a good year for me to be able to just dial in on my training, get a little bit bigger as well, and kind of grow into the college scene as it’s a lot different than high school.

“Coming off that gap year, I had a really successful sophomore year start. I was off to a 16-4 start before breaking my foot in a match vs. North Carolina, which forced me to get surgery two weeks later. It was a little bit annoying as I was just coming off a win over a top-10 ranked kid.”

After recovering from his foot surgery, Dunnigan returned to the mat before the Waldwick, N.J. native suffered a torn ACL a month into his comeback. “I wrestled the rest of that junior year in a brace with a fully torn ACL as I postponed the surgery so I could wrestle that year. But that was pretty tough on my body as well as my confidence. But I was able to go on to have a pretty good senior year.”

Choosing Rutgers

After earning his undergraduate degree from Penn’s Wharton School of Business, Dunnigan took official visits to the University of Virginia and University of Pittsburgh, “but in the end I knew I wanted to come back home and wrestle at the RAC (now known as Jersey Mike’s Arena).”

“I’ve known Coach Goodale for a long time in the years that I competed against him and I always looked at him as ‘a guy that I’d love to have in my corner.’ Same goes with Coach Pollard (Joe, assistant coach), I kind of grew up with him a little bit in my corner as we’d go to Fargo and he’d be coaching me in the corner. So I have a little bit of a relationship with him.”

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