John Hancock excelled as an athlete and as a coach in both football and track, but he will forever be remembered for his impact on the sport of wrestling.
After earning All-American honors in 1924 as a football player at the University of Iowa, Hancock joined the staff at Colorado State College (now Northern Colorado) as the coach of three sports. Aside from brief tenures at Mississippi State and Marquette, Hancock spent the next forty years at Colorado State College as a coach and athletic director.
Hancock’s wrestling squads won the Rocky Mountain Championship twenty-one consecutive times. He led the team to two National Championships and coached sixteen All-Americans. In 1936, Hancock established the Colorado State High School Wrestling Tournament. The first year of the event only eight schools participated, and today, the popular annual meet draws hundreds of wrestlers from all over the state of Colorado.
When Hancock died in 1993, Wrestling USA magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential men in the sport.
