Kaplan trusts process at Indiana Tech

Rose Kaplan doesn’t set goals based on results. For someone who has piled up as many of them as she has, that might seem strange.

“I don’t like to base my goals on results,” said Kaplan. “I think it adds so much unnecessary pressure. I really enjoy the process.”

The process has treated the Indiana Tech junior well. Kaplan earned All-America honors as a freshman in 2025, placing sixth at 124 pounds at the NAIA Women’s Wrestling National Championships. Last season, she won a Mid-South Conference title and reached the NAIA national finals, where she fell to Doane’s Cristelle Rodriguez, a U20 and U23 world champion and 2026 senior world team member.

Indiana Tech head women’s wrestling coach Paul Rademacher said the way Kaplan handles both sides of the sport is what first caught his attention.

“The biggest thing, especially then, was how she handled winning and losing,” said Rademacher. “I mean, there was a lot of winning, so don’t mishear that. But winning and losing wasn’t the end of the world for her. She knew she was going to get better. She was taking it and gathering data: ‘How do I fix this?’”

Kaplan grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana. Her father Ian wrestled at the NCAA Division I level for Davidson College, but her path to the sport ran through a hometown gym called Impact Zone, where she took self-defense classes and then picked up jiu-jitsu. Around fifth grade, her father asked if she wanted to join the middle school wrestling team. It was all boys. She said yes anyway.

“The first few years, there was definitely a lot of losing,” said Kaplan. “But wrestling for me has never been about the results. Getting the opportunity to work at it every day and improve year after year was what I found joy in.”

Kaplan said her father was in her corner when she needed a coach but never pushed.

“I never felt forced or pressured by him to do anything,” said Kaplan. “All that motivation and pressure came from myself. I think that has been really helpful and is part of the reason I’ve gotten as far as I have.”

She started freestyle with the Indiana Ignites, an Indiana girls wrestling program run by Jason DeLois. One of the team’s regular stops was War of the Roses, an event Kaplan has now attended for 10 years as an athlete and a coach.

“I don’t think I won that tournament until my senior year,” said Kaplan. “It was just year after year of making little adjustments.”

Those adjustments added up. At West Lafayette High School, Kaplan was a four-time state finalist and a two-time Indiana state champion. In 2023, she won a Junior Nationals folkstyle title and placed second at the Super 32 Challenge. She also placed fourth in freestyle at the Junior Nationals in Fargo that summer, then improved to runner-up in 2024, falling only to current Iowa All-American Karlee Brooks.

Rademacher first saw her on a Fargo trip during her freshman year of high school. With West Lafayette only a couple of hours from the Indiana Tech campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Warriors kept tabs on her from there.

“Going into her senior year, when we got back from Fargo, we sat her down and said, ‘Hey, we want you here, whatever that takes,’” said Rademacher.

Kaplan said Indiana Tech felt different from anywhere else.

“It felt like family here,” said Kaplan. “Everyone was so welcoming. There were already a couple of girls on the team I knew from camps who had been mentors, coaches and friends to me.”

When Kaplan arrived, the women’s program was only four years old. Rademacher said she was one of the highest-level athletes the Warriors had ever brought in. It didn’t take long to see what she could do.

“A month into the season, we were looking around saying, ‘She’s winning a lot of really high-level matches and beating some previous All-Americans,’” said Rademacher. “‘Yeah, she’s going to be in the mix for sure.’”

She was in the mix in March. Seeded fifth at the 2025 NAIA national tournament in Park City, Kansas, Kaplan won her first two matches before dropping a 5-3 decision to Missouri Valley’s Jasmina Immaeva in the quarterfinals. She won twice in the consolation bracket to clinch All-America honors, then lost to Immaeva again in the fifth-place match.

Rademacher said the biggest change in Kaplan as a sophomore was mental.

“She was willing to adjust her style and evaluate herself,” said Rademacher. “Maybe her freshman year was a little bit of, ‘Hey, I’m a freshman. I’ve got time.’ Her sophomore year, I think she realized she was good enough to do it.”

Kaplan felt the shift, too.

“Especially in the second half of the season, I focused a lot on positivity, being grateful for where I was and taking everything one step at a time,” said Kaplan. “The losses I took were tough, but I’ve never been one to let something like that set me back.”

The results followed. Kaplan went 6-0 in one November week, winning the Blue Hose Challenge, and was named NAIA Women’s Wrestler of the week.

There was a rough weekend in there, too, including a loss to Providence’s Alyssa Randles, a wrestler Kaplan had edged 6-5 at nationals the year before.

“I think she had a good game plan coming into that match,” said Kaplan. “In the end, I knew the adjustments I had to make. I knew what went right, what went wrong and what I needed to fix for the match to end more in my favor next time.”

Kaplan also took on a bigger role in the room as a captain, which forced her to rethink what a leader looks like.

“I used to think a leader was someone who was vocal and loud, telling people what to do and what not to do,” said Kaplan. “That’s never been me. I’m generally a pretty quiet person. When Paul made me a captain, it changed my definition of what a leader is. I’m confident that if someone didn’t know what to do and looked at what I was doing, I’d be doing the right thing.”

Rademacher saw that leadership take hold when the team needed to regroup after the NAIA National Duals.

“I think she was able to grab everybody and say, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing, and I’m going to lead the way. Follow me,’” said Rademacher. “That was a big part of what we saw through January and February.”

In February, Indiana Tech placed second at the Mid-South Conference Championships, the best conference finish in program history. Kaplan was named Wrestler of the Tournament after beating Lindsey Wilson’s Kamilah Brooks 9-1 in the finals.

When the NAIA brackets came out, the No. 2-seeded Kaplan drew Immaeva, the wrestler who had beaten her twice at nationals a year earlier, in the first round.

“I looked at them and went, ‘Oh, great. We’ve got the girl who beat us twice at nationals last year, and we’ve got her in the first round,’” said Rademacher. “I was nervous going into the match, but I could see Rose’s calmness throughout the week. I think she believed going in that she was going to win the tournament.”

Kaplan pinned Immaeva in 2:54. She followed with falls over Bismarck State’s Rei Ogden and William Penn’s Tati Paragas to reach the semifinals and a rematch with Brooks. This time, Brooks played defense and made Kaplan come to her. Kaplan held position, earned the passivity calls she needed and won 2-1.

“I’m a very patient wrestler, and that tends to stress people out when I win a match by one point,” said Kaplan. “But I knew that if I kept my head in it and maintained my position, I was going to win. I just needed to stay disciplined.”

That set up a final against the top-seeded Rodriguez, a multiple-time NAIA national champion Kaplan had never wrestled. Rodriguez caught her in a gut wrench and won by technical superiority, 10-0.

“When I walked out there, I was as ready as I could be,” said Kaplan. “Obviously, I got caught. She has a very good gut wrench, but I think I was as prepared as I could have been mentally.”

Rademacher said Kaplan’s response to the loss is what he respects most about her.

“It hurts. It sucks,” said Rademacher. “I know how much it meant to her to get to that spot. But she knows it was something fixable. We went right back to work to fix it as soon as we got home. That shows the competitor she is and who she is as a person, not just as a wrestler.”

Kaplan finished the season 40-6 as one of five All-Americans for a seventh-place Indiana Tech team. This spring, she placed sixth at 57 kilograms at the U.S. Open.

Opponents usually know what’s coming. Kaplan wrestles off a snap-down that leads to a front headlock, and one of her favorite moves from there ends in a pinning combination.

“Realistically, everybody in the country who scouts her knows what’s coming, and it still happens,” said Rademacher. “She has a good feel for when to snap, where to snap and where to put people.”

The offseason work has focused on what happens when her first line of defense breaks down.

“If we’re going to try to catch Cristelle, we’re going to have to absorb the first shot, stay in our defense and get to the next layer without getting taken down first,” said Rademacher.

Kaplan’s favorite workout partner at home is her younger sister, Isabel, now a freshman at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa.

“I can roll out of bed, walk into her room and say, ‘Hey, do you want to go to Impact Zone and wrestle today?’” said Kaplan. “It’s so much fun to be able to do that.”

Rademacher said those weekend sessions have led to a few friendly negotiations about rest.

“I don’t want to say it was a fight with me, but we’d have conversations like, ‘Hey, I don’t want you to wrestle this weekend,’” said Rademacher. “That’s who Rose is. She knows that when she goes home and gets to wrestle with her sister for a few minutes, it helps her reset her feel for some of the things she does.”

The goal for her junior season sounds a lot like the one she had as a freshman.

“I’m picking up from last year, taking things one step at a time, day by day, and having the best practices I can every day,” said Kaplan. “Eventually, I’ll get there.”

Rademacher has no doubt.

“She has that drive to close the gaps when they exist,” said Rademacher. “It’s going to be fun to watch her widen the gaps when she gets the chance to start widening them instead of closing them.”