Tanner Harvey: full household, busy life, big wrestling plans
Tanner Harvey turns over Oklahoma State’s Luke Surber (courtesy Karl Maasdam/Oregon State sports communications)
CORVALLIS — Senior Day is over, a rousing success in Oregon State’s 30-3 victory over Stanford Sunday at Gill Coliseum. Now it is time for each of the seniors to address the crowd of family and friends gathered for the post-meet “social” in the mat room of the OSU wrestling complex.
Most of the athletes keep it short. Not Tanner Harvey, who looks comfortable in front of a crowd. He says he appreciates it when people approach him in Corvallis and tells him he is their favorite OSU wrestler.
“That’s awesome,” he says. “At least it’s not Trey Munoz.”
The throng roars. Munoz is the Beavers’ top-ranked wrestler, sixth nationally. He grins.
Harvey thanks his wife, Crystal, for “dealing with all my wrestling throughout the years” and, during convalescence from injury, “taking care of me while I can’t get off the couch.” And his parents, Heath and Kim. And his coach at Lowell High, National Wrestling Hall of Famer Jerry Dilley. And …
“OK,” coach Chris Pendleton jumps in, “we have to wrap it up.”
Everyone laughs again. Harvey has had more than his say.
Harvey has had his say on the mats this season for the Beavers, whose next venture is the Pac-12 Championships March 5 at Stanford. The grad senior is 20-6 at 197 pounds in his only season wrestling for Oregon State. He will be seeded second at the Pac-12 meet and is ranked 17th nationally.
But there is much more to Tanner Harvey than wrestling.
OSU coach Chris Pendleton calls him a “Renaissance Man” and “The Most Interesting Man in the World.”
I forgot to ask Harvey if he drinks Dos Equis. More on all of this later.
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Tanner is the third of eight children — four boys, four girls — born to Heath and Kim Harvey in Elkton, a town of about 180 located on the lower Umpqua River, an hour and a half south of Corvallis and west of Interstate-5. It was a great place to grow for a youngster who loves peace and quiet and the outdoors. “I love small towns,” he says.
Heath is a logger by trade. Tanner calls him “the world’s greatest lumberjack.” Tanner’s parents still live in Elkton. Heath, Tanner and Tanner’s grandfather and brother own a logging company, with an office in Creswell. “They are taking care of things,” Tanner says, “while I’m wrestling.”
Besides being a small-town, big-family kid, Tanner is unusual in another important way. He is 24, married and the father of three young children.
“It is rare for an athlete to give a coach lessons on how to be a father and husband,” jokes Pendleton, married with a 2-year-old son, Ryker, and another child due in June.
Surprisingly, this is not unique among those Pendleton has coached.
“Oddly enough, I had a 35-year-old retired Green Beret start a match for me at Arizona State,” says Pendleton, an assistant coach for the Sun Devils for seven years before arriving in Corvallis in 2020.
The wrestler’s name was Roman Rowell. He was married with six kids.
“He came into my office and wanted to walk on,” Pendleton recalls. “I said, ‘Roman, you’re getting up there. We’re the same age. Our bodies aren’t built for this.’ He looked me in the eyes and told me a story, that when he was in a rough spot in Afghanistan he made a promise to God that if he got out of this situation alive, he would chase his goals. One of them was to be a Division I wrestler.”
Rowell was a one-off at Arizona State; Harvey has been anything but. Home-schooled in high school, he didn’t attend local Elkton High. He made the one-hour trip — for wrestling practice and meets, not for school — to Lowell High, located southeast of Eugene, where his father had been a four-time state champion under Dilley. Tanner was a three-time state 2A champion himself at Lowell, where enrollment figures numbered 76 students. “My graduating class (of 2016) was 15,” he says.
And that was going to be it for wrestling. Harvey wasn’t going to go to college. For a year, he worked with his father in the woods. They would drive four hours each way to work, then be back in the afternoons at Lowell for the wrestling practice, or meet, of younger brother Tommy.
“Dad and I would both coach him up and practice with him,” Tanner says.
Then Tommy upset Culver’s Marco Retano — a three-time state champion — 8-1 to claim the 2A state 160-pound title in 2017.
“It was one of those defining moments where I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I miss it,’ ” Tanner says.
The only coach who recruited Tanner out of high school was Adam Whitlatch at Southwest Oregon Community College, only an hour southwest of Elkton.
“He gave me a chance to wrestle,” Tanner says. “Not a lot of girls in the woods, either. Colleges seemed like a good idea for that as well.”
Harvey redshirted his first year at SWOCC, which gave him time to concentrate on academics. There he met Crystal, a tutor at the school’s tutoring lab. Wrestlers were required to log a certain number of hours of tutor time each week.
“Pretty soon I had like 20 hours a week going in there,” Tanner says. “My coach was giving me all sorts of praise for doing that. Then he came to realize I was actually in there trying to get to know her. One night, we took the elevator together and ended up exchanging numbers.”
A year and a half later, they were married. Nearly five years later, they have a growing brood — Heath 4, Charly, 3, and Callahan, 1 1/2.
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Harvey declared winner after pinning Darrius Walker of Linfield (courtesy Dave Nishitani/Oregon State sports communications)
During Harvey’s second year at SWOCC, he was a national junior college champion. He transferred to what would seem an unlikely destination — American University in Washington, D.C.
“I got calls (from college coaches) from all over the country,” Tanner says. “I took Crystal everywhere I visited. We were pregnant with Heath at the time. I wanted her to like wherever we were going. That was her favorite place to go. I thought it would be a new experience, going from a small town to something big.”
Harvey had success during his two years at American, amassing a record of 52-19 with 17 pins. He qualified for the NCAA Championships as a sophomore and was ranked No. 17 nationally at 184 as a junior in 2020 before Covid caused cancellation of the NCAA meet.
“We both loved it at American,” Tanner says. “One of our favorite things was all the different kind of food options in Washington. We loved the coach who was there at the time, Teague Moore.”
Once Covid hit, American shut down services.
“They weren’t letting us practice or lift,” he says. “Everybody else around the county was doing it. Some riots were going on in D.C. I had my wife and kids there. I decided to come back home.”
Again, Harvey thought his wrestling career was over. He returned to logging with his family. He worked through the summer. But he kept getting calls from Whitlatch, reminding him he still had a season of wrestling eligibility remaining.
“Kids; gotta work,” Tanner told him.
“Dad kept talking to me about coming back,” he says. “And then I got recruited a little bit by the Oregon State coaching staff. So finally, I thought, ‘Let’s give it a last hurrah.’ ”
And then, during the wrestle-offs before the 2021-22 season began, Harvey blew out a knee and underwent ACL surgery. He was lost for the season. Pendleton won’t say he was destined to be a starter for that season.
“You never know,” the OSU coach says. “We had a deep team with a lot of options. But we knew he was a guy who had a chance to be special for us.”
Harvey has been that guy this season. His biggest win was a 14-9 decision over No. 18 Luke Surber of Oklahoma State before a crowd of more than 6,700 at Gill Coliseum.
“That’s a moment I will never forget,” he says.
Harvey’s aggressiveness is what his coach likes most.
“He has a willingness to take chances,” Pendleton says. “One of the hardest things for a coach is to get a guy who wants to take shots and roll the dice. Tanner likes putting himself in the dangerous situations quite a bit.”
Harvey’s losses this season have all come to wrestlers ranked ahead of him — No. 2 Michael Beard of Lehigh (9-5), No. 3 Max Dean of Penn State (6-3), No. 5 Bernie Truax of Cal Poly (7-5), No. 7 Yonger Bastida of Iowa State (3-2), No. 8 Isaac Trumble of North Carolina State (6-4) and No. 16 Jacob Cardenas of Cornell (9-5). None of the losses have been by more than four points.
“The season has gone pretty well,” he says. “If I had turned things around in a couple of those losses, I would have a better ranking and a better seed going into the Pac-12 and national championships.”
“Once you break down his record and see how many close losses he has to guys ranked nationally, you realize he is right there with the best of the weight class,” Pendleton says. “Tanner has the ability to make a deep run in the postseason.”
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Harvey after his 14-9 victory over Surber (courtesy Karl Maasdam/Oregon State sports communications)
Then there is Harvey’s personal life, which begins with family. Watching his kids climb all over him at the wrestling “social” is to see a deep bond with their dad. Crystal is the angel who allows Tanner to balance family, school and wrestling.
“It seems impossible at times,” he says. “The only way I can do it is my support system. It starts with Crystal, who takes care of the kids, has dinner ready when I come home and gives me a neck massage if I’m sore after practice. If I were with anybody else, it would be impossible.”
“I’m a lot of help,” Crystal says with a smile, “but Tanner has a lot of mental strength. If there is something I need him to do at home, he is always willing to help, even if he is tired. He was born to be a dad and to wrestle.”
And to do a lot of things, it seems. Among his endeavors:
Airplane pilot: “I saw an advertisement to become a pilot and started to do the training. A few years ago, I was going to take the private pilot oral exam to get my license, but it got canceled four or five times that summer. Then wrestling started up and I didn’t get back to it. When I got hurt last year and was sitting around and couldn’t do anything, I started studying again and finished up at the Corvallis Airport and got my license. We fly all the time. I took the wife and kids all over the state last summer.”
Ocean diving: “I love diving. My freshman year in high school, Dad, my brother and I spent a summer working in Newport. We would go down after work almost every day and spear fish and get crab out of Yaquina Bay.”
House construction: “We started a new branch of the logging business to build and sell homes. I’m trying to get into real estate. My bachelor’s degree (from American) is business administration with a speciality in realty.”
Drones: “I have a little camera drone and have put some videos together (check it out on Instagram). I have a video of my dad and I cutting timber. Just a nice little hobby to have.”
Collecting gemstones. “That’s mostly Crystal. It helps us find things to do where we’re at. She has jars of agates all over the house. We have a new thing: We want to go look for some sun stones in eastern Oregon.”
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Harvey will soon return to the woods and the family logging business. For now, though, he is intensely focused on what he considers the two biggest meets of his career — the Pac-12s and the NCAAs, the latter March 16-18 at Tulsa, Okla.
At Stanford, he will be No. 2 seed behind Cal Poly’s Truax.
“Bernie is a talented guy with a unique skill set,” Tanner says. “But I think I have a great chance to win the Pac-12s. If I change a couple of things, I can pull that one out.”
Harvey will have to leapfrog a lot of higher-ranked wrestlers to place in the top eight and reach All-America status at nationals. He is shooting for more than that.
“I’m not doing this to get second place,” he says evenly. “I want to go all the way. I want to be a national champ. I really think I can do it. I have had close matches with everybody who is up there in the rankings.
“This coaching staff at Oregon State is fantastic. They get down to the nitty gritty in terms of technique. I think it is going to turn out good for me this year.”
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