Dan Curran has blocked giant defensive linemen and wrestled opponents considered to be the best in New England. But the toughest role he’s ever had to fill? Probably Woodstock, the fluffy yellow avian Snoopy sidekick he played in “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.” Curran, a rising junior wrestler and football player, spends half his time “nerding out” and the other half working out, balancing video games and Magic club with weight room sessions and off-season club wrestling. Some good-natured ribbing might be expected from his teammates, but Curran said he doesn’t get much of that.
“I’m certainly not mocked,” Curran said. “I really don’t hear anything about it. I walk from Magic club right into football practice — literally one into the other — every Tuesday, which I think is hilarious. And then I go to musical practice right after.”
Curran keeps a full schedule — “it’s pretty ridiculous,” he said — and it starts early. During the school year, he’s up at 5 a.m., ready to run or bike to school for morning weightlifting sessions. Some wintry days, he’s sliding down ice-covered Sand Hill Road in four sweatshirts, but if he doesn’t think he needs a ride to school, he doesn’t take one.
That dedication to the weight room is one of the keys to Dan’s athletic success. He’s bulked up a bit from the eighth-grader who won three straight middle school wrestling championships at 143 lbs.
Over the past two years, he’s been locked into some battles with Newport’s Stephen Nix, the state champion at 170 lbs. Curran wrestled him several times since entering high school and nearly beat him on a few occasions, but never quite pulled it off — something he regrets, as Nix is now graduated and Curran won’t have another shot at him.
Curran will now enter his junior year as one of the top wrestlers in his weight class, but he isn’t counting his chickens before they hatch simply because his nemesis is out of the picture.
“I’ve got to get stronger, I’ve got to get better technique, I’ve got to put in more time,” Curran said. “No matter how many hours you put into wrestling, you can always get better. It’s one of those sports where the margin gets smaller and smaller and smaller but that tiny little bit extra becomes more and more important.”
Part of that work includes his training with the Doughboy Wrestling Club in Lowell, Massachusetts, an elite off-season club for the most serious wrestlers. There, he hones his skills and techniques, and even wrestles in tournaments. But, he said, “It can’t match the spirit I have for my school. I care much more about ConVal than I do about Doughboy, because I don’t intend on going to college for wrestling, I intend on going to college for college.”
Curran still has some pretty lofty goals for his time in high school.
“Within ConVal, I intend to be the best in ConVal’s history,” Curran said. “I’ve looked up at the banner and I’ve seen how many state titles, how many New England titles people have had in the past. New England titles are none! So let’s change that. I’m looking at getting the most wins. I’m looking at getting the most takedowns, I want to get the most tech falls — I want to get the most everything. I want to be the best in ConVal’s history. More important than that, though, I want to change the course of ConVal wrestling.”
Curran has a good shot at many of those goals. He’s already finished in the top eight at the New England Championships (and likely would have finished even higher if he hadn’t taken an errant boot to the face during one of those matches). And he’s already at 73 wins in his two years, easily on pace to break Adam Smullen’s career record of 118 victories.
Barring injury, he may just go down as one of the best; but for someone as active and physical as he is, injuries are nearly unavoidable. Over the past couple of weeks, Curran’s been sidelined from both his Doughboys practices and off-season football training due to a leg injury, and he’s growing restless.
“I’m kind of living the dream here by saying ‘Okay Dan, you’re not allowed to do anything but play video games and eat food.’ It’s just such a weird feeling for me,” Curran said.
Nonetheless, Curran attends the morning football workouts, planking and doing upper-body work as the rest of the team goes through their strength and agility training. He’s just as dedicated to football as he is to wrestling — his big hitting earned him the coveted Sledgehammer Award from his Monadnock Mountaineers youth football coach, and he hasn’t looked back since. Last season, he was an All-State nose tackle despite playing with an arm injury for the majority of the season (he’s still disappointed about some of the plays he couldn’t make with his arm not fully functional).
And, despite being “noticeably undersized,” he started at center, keeping quarterback Dan Spezzaferri clean as the ConVal passing offense shattered a heap of school records. Facing up against bigger defensive linemen, Curran was still effective, eve when he knew he was physically overmatched.
“I’m telling Dan Spezz, ‘Buddy, you’ve got 3 and a half seconds and he’s coming,’” Curran said.
It worked. Spezzaferri threw twice as many touchdown passes (22) as he took sacks (11). And if Curran couldn’t stop the defensive lineman himself, no worries — just shuffle him over to the guard, his older brother Josh.
Dan and Josh were quite the duo, playing football, wrestling and even starring in plays together (Josh was the Snoopy to Dan’s Woodstock). Curran had plenty of friendly scraps with Josh and their older brother, Thomas — “let’s call it brotherly love,” Curran joked — and that’s helped make him even stronger. In fact, Curran credits Josh for getting him into wrestling.
“The first wrestling practice I ever went to, I punched my brother in the face,” Curran said. “I didn’t know what wrestling was.”
“[Josh] is still mad,” joked their father, John.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Curran does all this while spreading the word of God.
“I’m personally devoted to the message saying ‘You know what – Christians can hit people hard, too.’ You don’t have to be one or the other,” Curran said. “God put me in this great situation where I can be a strong athlete due to the situation I was raised in, and I’m very thankful for that.”