Backstreet Boys to back points: David Taylor and Levi Haines’ friendship

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (WTAJ) – Olympic Gold Medalist David Taylor has been a friend, coach and big brother to 2024 National Champion Levi Haines. The Penn State sophomore started training at Taylor’s M2 Training Center back when he was in eighth grade.

“I remember the very first practice. He was just in the room and wrestling with one of his teammates and I’m like ‘this kid’s a wrestler,'” Taylor said to WTAJ. “(He was always) there the next practice and next practice. (I then found) out he’s driving two and a half hours one way.”

The trip from Haines’ hometown of Biglerville is nearly 120 miles away from Pleasant Gap, where M2 is located. It poses the question, why did Haines decide to train there?

“It’s just where the best training was so that’s what was so enticing about it,” Haines said to WTAJ. “I could get the best training from one of the best wrestlers in the world and so I wasn’t the one driving either. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, so my parents are doing it after school.”

Going the extra distance has paid off for Haines. He won a PIAA Championship in his junior year of high school and then an NCAA championship last month, making his mentor tremendously proud of him as a person and wrestler.

“You hope you get an opportunity to coach a guy like that once in your life,” Taylor said. “We just got fortunate that it was one of the first kids we ever coached.”

Throughout the years, they’ve bonded over the sport and even Taylor singing the Backstreet Boys on the way.

“That’s a memory that is always kind of engraved in my mind because he just was there kind of lighting up the mood and then obviously went on to make my first age level world team that day,” Haines said.

If Taylor and Haines want it their way, both would be qualifying for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, France. First, they need to win their weight classes though at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials, which is held in the Bryce Jordan Center on Friday and Saturday.

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