When it comes to his hopes for the future, St. Cloud State wrestler Tad Merritt’s head is quite literally in the clouds.

A sophomore aviation major working toward a career in the airline industry, Merritt often can be found 5,000 feet above ground in the Cessna 172 airplane he owns a share in along with teammate Alex Kontz.

As a nationally ranked redshirt freshman on St. Cloud State’s squad, Merritt has his sights set on becoming an all-American at this year’s Division II National Championships Festival.

Merritt and Kontz grew up together in Canby, Minnesota, about 150 miles west of St. Cloud, where they are now teammates on the Husky wrestling squad. As Kontz was enrolling at St. Cloud State last fall and Merritt was returning for his second year, one of the co-owners of the plane Kontz and his father own shares in was looking to sell his portion. Merritt jumped at the opportunity to have more time in the air and bought the available share.

“I don’t get to fly very much during wrestling season, and then I fly a lot during the offseason. It’s something different and fun to do,” Merritt said. Merritt and Kontz keep the plane in a rented hangar at the St. Cloud Regional Airport while at school and make the 45-minute flight back to Canby during breaks.

Although Merritt has been wrestling since elementary school, his passion for aviation has been a more recent discovery. Merritt was captivated by what he saw at an air show during his junior year at Canby.

“A buddy of mine who used to wrestle at Canby was a flight instructor at the time and he said, ‘You should come up,’ ” Merritt recalled. About 40 hours of instruction followed and in late June 2007, after graduating from high school Merritt earned his private pilot’s license.

His newfound interest in aviation never distracted Merritt from competition on the mat. Following in the footsteps of his father, a two-time state champion for Canby in 1976 inand 1977, Merritt captured two individual state titles of his own in 2006 and 2007, leading the team to the state title in 2006. His performance garnered the attention of St. Cloud State coach Steve Costanzo.

After redshirting his freshman season, Merritt is on a hot streak this year, ranking among the top grapplers in the nation in the 165-pound weight class in the National Wrestling Coaches Association poll.

Merritt and Kontz once convinced Costanzo to join them for a ride in their four-seater single-engine plane.

“It was kind of windy so there was a lot of turbulence,” Merritt said. “He’d never been in a small plane before, and he didn’t like it so much. Then we gave him a negative-G, where you’re weightless for a minute, and he really didn’t like that, so we took him back down.”

Costanzo recalled the experience from the back seat of the plane. “I felt very uncomfortable, and then they thought it would be kind of funny to drop the plane so my guts were in my throat, so to speak. I trust them, and they’ve got a lot of experience, but it just kept going through my mind that these guys are 18 or 19 years old, so I told them to go on back down.”

Costanzo’s squads consistently are among the top 15 Division II wrestling teams in grade-point average, a statistic he contributes to the attitude of his coaching staff and student-athletes like Merritt.

“That’s the mission of our coaching staff, to know that wrestling is just part of the journey here, but ultimately these guys are here to graduate and develop lifelong skills,” Costanzo said. “(Merritt’s) GPA is high enough that he isn’t required to come to study hall, but he does anyway because he’s made academics a priority. He leads by example.”

Along with pursuing his dream of becoming an airline pilot, Merritt hopes to tackle a few other goals during his time at St. Cloud State.

“My goal at St. Cloud State is to be a national champion and set as many records as I can, but more importantly my No. 1 goal is to be national champion as a team before I graduate,” Merritt said. “That would be so much more rewarding than just an individual national championship because…wrestling is more about team than individual.”

Costanzo emphasized Merritt’s impact on the team’s outlook.

“He’s going to be a force to be reckoned with in years to come, and we feel really fortunate to have him in our program,” Costanzo said.