Noah Gindorff, Hayden Zillmer making small town of Crosby, Minn., look big

“At 88 pounds,” he told Zillmer.

Zillmer gave him a friendly correction.

“Eighty-found pounds,” Zillmer said with a laugh.

Zillmer is still blooming at age 29, winning his weight class in the Final X New York freestyle wrestling meet to advance to the Senior World Championships. Zillmer did it in dramatic fashion, rallying from a 5-0 deficit in the final minute in the third and deciding match.

It’s turning into quite the start of summer for two athletes from the small town of Crosby, Minn., population 2,780 located north of Brainerd. NDSU senior tight end Noah Gindorff has been the talk on a national scale of a few early NFL prospect discussions.

Both Zillmer and Gindorff attended Crosby-Ironton High School.

“Just that Iron Range toughness,” Mike Gindorff, Noah’s father, said with a laugh. “We’ve had good coaches. We’ve had the same group of guys, about six to eight of us, who have coached for quite some time. But you have to have talent, too.”

Gindorff is on a watch list of sorts on NFLdraftscout.com and NFLdraftbuzz.com. He was invited to the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl last season before a broken fibula in the FCS playoffs sidelined that plan. It was shortly after the injury that Gindorff announced he was returning to NDSU for his sixth season.

Jim Nagy, the executive director of the Senior Bowl, said in a teasing tweet last week that Gindorff and teammates Cody Mauch and Hunter Luepke are candidates to be taken in the 2023 NFL Draft.

Noah Gindorff recently worked out for a week with a coach who is affiliated with “Tight End U,” the position-specific offseason training plan founded by notable NFL tight ends Travis Kelce, George Kittle and Greg Olsen.

“He sent me a text and he said his legs feel 100%,” Mike Gindorff said. “I think Noah is a draftable player. He likes to block and he’s big and physical and he could last a long time provided he stays healthy. He’s at the point now where they’re giving him stuff to polish up on and that’s a good thing.”

Mike Gindorff still vividly remembers Zillmer not being heavy enough in ninth grade to wrestle varsity at Crosby-Ironton. Since leaving NDSU, he’s continued to grow, both on the mat and physically.

The Senior World Championships is the first world meet he’s made.

“I’ve had a vision on this for a long time,” Zillmer said. “It just finally came true. A lot of hard work and the timing was right. I finally have an opportunity to go win a medal. My training has been amazing leading up to the World Team Trials and I feel like it will only get better from here.”

Zillmer has made the adjustment from making the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials at Greco-Roman to freestyle at 187 pounds. He finished his NDSU career in 2016 and is currently wrestling for the Gopher Wrestling Club.

He’s also made a successful transition to heavyweight. That is baffling to those who watched him wrestle at Crosby-Ironton. At around 230 pounds, he said he likes competing against wrestlers bigger than him in a weight class that has a maximum of 275.

“I saw him at a wedding about a year ago and he was still a class below at whatever he is now,” Mike Gindorff said. “You get next to him and you realize how big he is. His work ethic is second to none.”

The Senior World Championships are Sept. 10-18 in Belgrade, Serbia. Zillmer plans on competing in one more meet in Tunisia in July before the final tuneups for the World Championships. That competition will be going on at the same time as the Bison football team playing at the University of Arizona.

Two kids from Crosby on a big stage perhaps on the same day.

“That’s awesome, he’s a big dude himself,” Zillmer said of the 6-foot-6, 266-pound Gindorff. “Crosby is a small town and having a couple of guys coming out of there, grinding and trying to find spots on these professional and world teams is amazing.”

At this rate, they may have to construct some sort of new welcome sign on the outskirts of town.

“Maybe there was something in the water a little bit, people could see a dream and believe it,” Zillmer said. “Seems like the area has had a few guys stepping up to the plate. I know I had good coaching.”