As Mark Perry walked around wrestling practice with his calming demeanor, one would never know a national wrestling legend was in the room. A combination of confidence and a genuine devotion to a sport he has grown up loving is displayed as he worked with his wrestlers in the Lorenzo Wrestling Complex.

Not evident are any signs of lingering injuries that could have haunted his collegiate wrestling career. But those signs are still there, he just won’t let anybody notice.

What is evident, however, is Perry’s innate desire to win at all costs. During short-goes at practice Thursday, Perry wrestled Jake Strayer, imitating the senior’s opponent to prepare him for his upcoming match against the No. 1 and No. 2 wrestlers in the country.

This weekend could determine if Strayer will contend for a national title in March. And Perry will do anything in his power to prepare his wrestlers — the desire to win always drove Perry since he was little.

As a high school wrestler at Blair Academy in New Jersey, Perry’s father, Mark Perry Sr., said his son would throw his second-place medals into the family’s pond, in disgust of not winning.

Some things change. Some things never change.

“He’s like everyone else in our family, we’re not used to losing and we will never get used to it,” Perry Sr. said. “One reason that everybody in our family is successful is that you don’t accept losing under any circumstance. If you’re losing you make changes to win. It’s just not acceptable to lose.”

Only one year removed from winning two straight 165-pound NCAA titles at the University of Iowa, the current Penn State assistant coach aims to teach his team the same philosophies he has learned while surrounded by the most knowledgeable wrestling minds in the nation. Using what he has learned from his Hawkeye coaches, in addition to being brought up in a family he calls the “best wrestling family in the United States,” Perry wants to get his messages through to his new team.

“He brings the philosophy of bringing that intensity every time you step out on the mat,” fellow Penn State assistant coach Matt Dernlan said. “If you want to be successful, you always have to bring that intensity.”

And as Perry recalled his collegiate career a couple months after its conclusion, he is the first to admit he was a stubborn wrestler. As a collegiate coach now, he can fully appreciate what his former head coach, Tom Brands, did for him.

“I look back and I want to punch myself in the face because I know how pissed off Brands probably was at me,” Perry said. “ ‘Man up. Make the changes. Perry quit feeling sorry for yourself. You have the talent.’ It’s just like, make the changes. It’s not going to come easy.

“Our guys who are struggling a little bit have to quit looking for the answers,” Perry said. “They’re almost looking for the easy way out. It’s almost like you can say at times that I’m a hypocrite. But that’s why I’m here so they don’t make the same mistakes I did.”

Mark Perry has dealt with injuries for his entire career. As an Iowa wrestler, he’s been taught to remain focused on his goals, despite what injuries might lay in the way.

An estimated 137 stitches were eventually needed to repair a torn meniscus in his right leg, an injury that Perry battled through for most of his junior and senior years.

Surgery was performed on the leg, and doctors estimated the Stillwater, Okla., native would need about six months of rehab before he could be back to 100 percent.

Six months was not going to work.

Nationals were five weeks away — Perry’s chance to defend his NCAA title. He was going to put everything he had on the mat. “No” is never an answer a wrestler gives when you have the expectations of an Iowa wrestler.

“I think a lot of people would slip there,” he said. “If they had a serious injury like that and it’s a six-month recovery period, but you only have one month to recover. A lot of people are going to let their mind slip.”

Perry said Brands was instrumental in keeping Perry’s mind off of his knee during his recovery time. So Perry got right back into wrestling. But he was not the same. He was still tentative and not aggressive with his knee injury, with a fear of what might happen to his leg.

“When I was a freshman, I shot about 15 times in the first period,” he said. “My senior year, I was shooting zero times in the first period. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t. I was always scared.”

With a large knee pad surrounding his knee cap and a mindset immersed with a desire of pushing away failure, Perry endured the toughest three matches of his life in January of his senior year. To the best of his knowledge, the gritty 165-pounder had never lost three consecutive matches in his entire life.

At the National Duals against Oklahoma State in 2007, Perry wrestled Johny Hendricks, as a referee on an adjacent mat blew his whistle, Perry interpreted it as stoppage of play on his match, and his meticulous intensity escaped him. He stood up and let up, allowing Hendricks to catch him off guard for a crucial takedown. After this loss, Perry admits he started to freefall.

Hendricks won that match for Oklahoma State and would defeat Perry again in the final seconds of a dual match six days later.

As if two losses to his rival weren’t disappointing enough, Perry fell to Big Ten rival Eric Tannenbaum in double overtime three days later.

“I’m still pissed off about that,” Perry said. “And I understand I’m a two-time national champ and an NCAA finalist, and it’s not like I’m a nobody. But growing up, you just don’t accept losing. It just doesn’t happen.”

It is when an athlete is at his or her lowest point when motivation makes the biggest difference, Perry says. Brands’ preaching and inspiration was instrumental in getting him through his rough times.

Perry said Brands told his wrestler something that would stick in his head forever.

“He told me something that kind of pissed me off,” Perry said. “ ‘With your lifestyle, you are never going to win the NCAA championships.’

“That put it into perspective. I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to throw it all out there and if I get injured I get injured. I’ll get surgery after. It’s not like you’re going to die.’ ”

“He was a gamer,” Brands said. “At the right time of the year he showed up. Not saying that he didn’t have a great career all the way around, which he did. But he was strongest at the end of the year and he was a gamer when the lights were on, he was at his best.”

One month after his surgery, the senior Iowa wrestler wrestled his way into the national title matchup once again. It was in his second NCAA final in two years.

Dr. Ben Wedro, an emergency physician who practices out of a trauma center in Wisconsin, said the reason why it’s hard to wrestle a month after knee surgery is because the knee doesn’t like getting a scope in it, and the muscles shut down afterwards.

“It takes a lot of effort to get it going,” Wedro said. “With elite athletes it happens, it’s easier if you or I did it. For example, [NFL quarterback] Philip Rivers had his knee scoped on a Tuesday and played in a Sunday playoff game. [These athletes’] muscles are so strong that they don’t have to go through the major rehab that an average person would.”

Although Perry had lost to his opponent a week before at the Big Ten championships, he was leading the short and stocky Tannenbaum 2-0 in the second period, despite having his knee still wrapped up.

It appeared as if it was going to be a storybook ending for Perry after all.

Then at the beginning of a restart in the middle of the mat with 3:10 left, Tannenbaum shot for Perry’s right leg, grabbed a hold and twisted it violently to the left.

The referee stopped play once Perry uttered a scream that resounded throughout the Scottrade Center. The Iowan wrestler used his hands as oars, trying desperately to move his body across the blue mat.

Perry had torn his medial collateral ligament (MCL) in the final match of his career. He was three minutes and 10 seconds away from defending his crown, but the knee that had given him trouble for a full year appeared ready to erase his happy ending.

“Initially, it scared me just because the pain hurt so bad,” Perry said. “But then [my coaches] kinda grabbed me by my face and said, ‘Get it together. You have three minutes and 10 seconds left to win another national title. Get it together and find a way to win. Gut it out.’

“Instead of coming in and asking, ‘Is your knee okay?’ They were coming into me from another angle, you know? We don’t care about your knee, your opponent doesn’t care about your knee, so quit caring about your knee.”

Perry said he would have taped his knee to his backside if he had to. This was the last match of his collegiate career — there was no way he was going to quit on this national stage.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re hurt, or injured, you have to find a way to win and that’s the bottom line,” Perry said.

It was now the third period and two minutes separated Perry from wrestling immortality. With a three-point lead, Perry had to avoid takedowns from Tannenbaum.

“The path of what he’s had to achieve is probably the hardest of any kid who has ever gone through college,” Perry Sr. said.

“You’re a national champion as an individual, you’re a national champion as a team, or you’re a failure,” Perry says. “That’s how you have to look at it if you’re a competitor. It’s first or nothing.”

Ten months after his hand was raised in St. Louis, Perry is leading a practice at Penn State, once his former rival school.

“After that, I never planned on coaching or anything,” Perry said. “My body was beat up bad. I had two bulging disks in my neck, tore the whole meniscus off, and tore my MCL. With the grind on my body, for a guy who doesn’t wrestle that [Iowa] type of style it was just a grind on my body and it didn’t feel like it meant to be grinded on that much. And I got in all these weird positions so I didn’t plan on getting into it.”

Dernlan said he and Perry weren’t really close until the 2008 national tournament. Dernlan and Perry chatted briefly before the Hawkeye was going to wrestle, and his poise impressed Dernlan, before he was going to wrestle in “arguably the most important match of his life.”

“We had an opening in our coaching staff and we wanted a guy to work with the middle weight classes,” Dernlan said.

And that is exactly what Perry’s role has been this season. Junior Dan Vallimont, who currently wrestles at the same weight Perry did in college, said Perry is a great workout partner for him in the gym.

“He’s always there helping me out with strategy and stuff and really just motivating me,” Vallimont said. “He’s really a big motivator and he’s all about hard work, with everybody not just with me. And he’ll push you farther than you think you can go, which is good, because we need it. He’s a competitor, you can tell he wants to be out there competing and I think that attitude helps us.”

Brands said Perry is an asset to any program that he is a part of. As a member of the Iowa squad, Perry was like a player-coach for his team.

“He was always talking strategies and tendencies of opponents and not just at his weight class,” Brands said. “He would look at the marquee matchups at dual meets and he'd always have advice for his teammates as well as the coaching staff.

“If you take him the wrong way, he could be hard to be embraced, but we embraced him. We loved it.”

Right now, Perry is considering training for the Olympics in 2012. He will definitely take this year off, because he did not properly rehab all of his injuries, and would not be in the condition to compete.

Competition is what continues to fuel this assistant coach.

Perry has beaten the guys who are succeeding on the national stage right now. He knows he can beat them, and he knows he will if he gets his body back into its best physical shape.

But simply competing with these guys isn’t good enough. As his father says: Winning is the only option.

“That’s how it is when you get to the next level, it’s not, ‘Can I make the United States team?’ ” Perry said. “It’s, ‘Can I win the Olympics?’ If not, it’s a waste of time. If you get second at the Olympics, big deal.”

This is the mentality that has been instilled in Perry since he was growing up. His father was a coach at the University of Nebraska and Oklahoma State. As a seven-year-old, Perry would come to practice with his dad and watch All-Americans train for a national title.

As a freshman in high school, Perry would wake up at six in the morning to accompany his father to practice, where he would complete the same workouts the collegiate athletes were doing.

“Him being around elite athletes is a huge advantage for a kid just because he gets to see the work ethic it takes to win at that level,” Perry Sr. said. “Being around college programs since he was seven because he understands what it takes to be successful at a high level.”

All the success Perry has had is self-driven, his father said. The determination to be the best is something Perry wants all of his Nittany Lion wrestlers to possess.

“Not everybody’s going to be like Iowa and Oklahoma State,” Perry Sr. said. “Mark’s been around the best coaches in the country and the best programs in his country his whole life. He’s aware of what it takes to win.”

But it has been frustrating thus far for him. Although injuries have set the team back significantly, but there is never an excuse for not winning, Perry says.