Barnes has a mission

SEATTLE — If the future of high school wrestling plays out the way Brent Barnes hopes, state titles for his Lake Stevens teams won’t come so easily five or 10 years from now.

That’s right, the long-time Lake Stevens coach who has led the Vikings to eight state titles wants winning to be harder for his athletes in the future. And that explains why, just a few weeks after his team cruised to title No. 8, Barnes is in this cramped, hot, smelly wrestling room in the basement of the Franklin High School gym.

You see, as much as wrestling has thrived in Lakes Stevens and other small communities around the state, it has struggled mightily in the city of Seattle. And to Barnes, this is a problem. Not just because, in an altruistic sense he’d like to see more kids find success in their lives through sports, but because as someone who has gotten so much out of wrestling, he fears for the future of his sport.

“Wrestling’s been very good to me, and I’m at a point where I need to give back to the sport,” Barnes said, drenched in just as much sweat as the athletes he is coaching. “And the most valuable thing that I can offer, by far, is my time. My time is worth far more than my money. Hopefully if you just touch a couple of kids, you’ve made an impact.”

Barnes and his son Burke have run offseason, freestyle wrestling camps for years (high schools compete in Greco-Roman wrestling, so offseason workouts conducted by high school coaches have to be freestyle) but those clinics have for the most part been geared toward the state’s top wrestlers.

Recently, Barnes decided it was time to do something different, time to find a way to help the sport grow in the state’s biggest city.

“This is where you can really get your hands on some kids at the grassroots level,” he said. “I really feel like if Seattle wrestling is healthy, wrestling is healthy. Right now, we’re going to run out of coaches. I’m the end of the baby boomers, and as soon as my generation is done, we’re going to have a hard time filling all the spots, especially in the city, so we need to produce our own coaches and our own wrestlers and our own officials, so the more people you get involved in the sport the better.”

On this particular Tuesday afternoon, there are about 30 kids crammed into a room Barnes estimates is a third of the size of the spacious wrestling room at Lake Stevens. Most of the group is made up of high school wrestlers from all over the Puget Sound area — Franklin, Cleveland, O’Dea, Kennedy, Chief Sealth, Renton, Bishop Blanchet, Kent-Meridian, Lake Stevens, Federal Way — but a handful are also middle-school age kids just learning the sport. This is where Barnes sees the most potential for growth. While kids in Lake Stevens and other wrestling-happy communities get involved in the sport when they’re still in grade school, the vast majority of wrestlers at Seattle schools, both public and private, are new to the sport as freshmen. Everyone in this gym seems to agree that for the sport to grow in Seattle, it has to start with getting kids interested early on.

That’s why Barnes is spending his Tuesday and Thursday nights from March through May to coach kids, the majority of whom can’t pay the fee Barnes and his son would usually charge for clinics, and that’s why wrestlers like Cleveland senior Buiford Martin is here even though his high school career is already over.

“I never did wrestling as a kid, because here in south Seattle, people only want to do basketball or track or football,” said Martin, who qualified for state each of the past two years. “So I want to try to help build a legacy here. Wrestling’s never been big here in south Seattle. I was starting from scratch as a freshman. No one helped motivate us. I’d work out with the kids from O’Dea, the private school, but nobody from the public schools like Rainier Beach or Cleveland or Franklin talks about wrestling. I want to build that here.”

The hope is that a year or two down the road, the small room in the basement of Franklin’s gym will be too small to host these workouts. Derek Lopez, the wrestling coach at O’Dea who helps Barnes with these workouts, has a long-term goal of turning a warehouse space somewhere in the city into a wrestling gym available to all.

“One of my top life goals is to build Seattle wrestling, not just to a respectable level, but to a powerhouse on the national level,” Lopez said. “It’s a completely untapped resource. There’s no opportunity. There’s no middle school wrestling, there are no freestyle clubs, so wrestling just isn’t a choice for most kids in the city … There’s no reason why if we get the coaching and the kids, we can’t turn this into a wrestling power. Seattle is good in football, it’s great in basketball, it’s great in track. It could be great in wrestling too.”

For now, however, Barnes and Lopez are happy with even the small growth they’re seeing from week to week at these sessions.

“The goal down the line in a number of years is to hopefully grow out of this facility and get into a place where we can create a middle school and high school training situation within the city,” Barnes said. “It might start with 10 guys, but our goal would be to have hundreds of kids involved in wrestling throughout the city of Seattle. But you have to start small, so this is where we’re at now.”

And it’s not that there aren’t plenty of well-meaning wrestling coaches in Seattle, it’s just that few have the experience and expertise of Barnes, who can also bring a handful of state champion wrestlers to any given workout. Lopez, who wrestled at O’Dea and Boise State, said he hasn’t heard any backlash from his fellow Metro League coaches about an out-of-towner coming to their city, and Jim Woodford, the coach at Franklin, is thrilled to have the help.

“I feel really lucky,” said Woodford. “I’m trying to be a student of the sport, and Brent does it right. It’s about wrestling, but it’s much deeper than wrestling for him. He’s a larger than life fellow, clearly a role model. And I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

And maybe, just maybe, these Franklin High School sessions will be the beginning of a wrestling revival in Seattle. No Metro League wrestler has won a state title since Blanchet’s Kevin Riley in 1983, and no one from a Seattle public school has won a title since *Scott McCormick of Evergreen in south Seattle won at 148 pounds in 1979. Ironically, the wrestler McCormick beat was a young Brent Barnes from Rogers High School in Puyallup.

Barnes would love to see that change, even if it makes winning a title harder to come by at Lake Stevens.

“I’m worried about this sport,” he said. “There’s such a disparity between the haves and the have-nots. When you can go to a tournament and blow everybody out of the water, it shouldn’t be like that. It would be pretty darn cool if a kid that started in ninth grade, and maybe got a little bit of help from us was able to go to the Tacoma Dome win a state title.”

Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.

*Correction, April 13, 2011: This article originally identified the incorrect wrestler.