Take a quick look at the Washington Wrestling Report state high school rankings this year and it jumps out at you.
The Wesco North is a Snohomish County hotbed for the world’s oldest martial art.
Three-time defending state champion Lake Stevens, which ended the season nationally ranked a year ago, is once again at the top of the 4A rankings. Snohomish, the state runner up last season, comes in at No. 12. While Everett sits in seventh in the 3A rankings.
So what’s the answer?
Well, there’s no easy answer like: the water in that part of the county is laced with testosterone. But the sport’s leading experts, the coaches, have a few explanations that all lead to the some similar conclusions.
It’s the coaches
The coaching staffs in the North have a great deal of experience and that begins with Lake Stevens coach Brent Barnes. The 22nd-year coach boasts six state titles and three second-place finishes in his career. He is the reason that Vikings wrestling is as much of a certainty as the calendar flipping every year to the month of December. Second-year Snohomish coach Rob Zabel says Barnes has been coaching Lake Stevens “since the invention of dirt.”
Everett’s Brien Elliott has been part of the wrestling scene since the early 1980s. He graduated from Everett in 1985 and has been the head coach for a total of 17 years with two separate stints.
While Zabel is in just his sophomore campaign, he has been involved in the Panther program for the past seven years.
Continuity among coaches, styles and philosophies seems to have a significant impact on the teams’ successes.
“One of the things that Everett and Lake Stevens have been fortuntate to have is a consistency in coaching staff,” Zabel said.
The top coaches start with the students at a young age and develop relationships with them that begin before high school, convincing them to sacrifice for a sport that involves being alone in a singlet on the mat in front of everyone.
The league’s coaches believe the sacrifice is worth it because the sport has been very rewarding to them. As a result they have given right back in the form of long hours in the gym, year-round work with students, mentorship and life coaching. It’s much more than just pins and throws.
Elliott’s passion for coaching the sport overflows onto the mat and that couldn’t have been any more evident than at a recent practice. He was one-on-one with one of his wrestlers showing him proper technique in slow motion when his foot got caught in the mat and the wrestler slipped and fell on his leg. Elliottt suffered torn ligaments and tendons in his right ankle, but don’t expect that to slow the Seagulls this season.
“We have a good staff and we’ll overcome,” Elliott said.
Snohomish has not quite been able to reload the way Lake Stevens has every year but Zabel sees what Barnes has done and has a model to raise the Panthers, who had two individual state-title winners last season, to challenge the Vikings.
“I think Brent has a stranglehold controlling wrestling in Wesco,” Zabel said. “We are trying to take steps to compete with them. You just kind of marvel at the success he’s had over the years.”
Despite the awards that the Lake Stevens coach seems to collect like a trophy shop, he doesn’t do it for the glory or the number of state titles.
“If you do it long enough you realize that’s not the reason you do it.”Barnes said. “You do it because you like to make kids better people. You do it because you want to mold just a team into a championship squad.”
Complacency is not part of his vocabulary for his wrestlers, including two-time defending state champion senior Josh Heinzer, and its not in his vocabulary for himself.
“If you stay the same, you aren’t getting better,” Barnes said.
It’s the towns
The North’s high schools are located in smaller, more rural communities where wrestling is an easier sell.
“It really is a throwback sport. There’s a lot of hard work, a lot of toil,” Barnes said. “You might not have a lot of fun, but it will be very rewarding in the end.”
Over the years more kids from say, Marysville, have been more likely to buy-in to the thankless work.
Elliott may know it best because Everett recently moved from the South to the North and the improved level of competition has not only been noticeable, but he feels it has made his wrestlers better by challenging them earlier in the season. For a high school to succeed in it, wrestling has to be a part of the local community the way little league baseball or soccer are for young kids in other areas.
“Trying to find a (championship) kid out of high school that’s never wrestled is almost impossible,” Elliott said.
It’s the community support
Snohomish’s gym, nicknamed “The Pit,” has the feel of a building from the movie “Hoosiers.” It has been around for 50 years and it’s a gathering place for the fans. Once they get a taste of Snohomish wrestling, Zabel’s goal is that they keep coming back both with time and dollars. The Panthers have fund raisers, they play music during matches, they announce former wrestlers that are in attendance and they cater to a core of community members who have decided to become a part of the program.
“Everyone wants to be a part of something and if we can do that with wrestling, we’ve done something good,” Zabel said. “I don’t know if other programs have that.”
Barnes points to the development of coaches in the middle school community and their dedication to bringing kids into the sport as giving the North part of its edge.
“The Snohomishes and Marysvilles and Everetts have continuity with our middle school programs,” Barnes said. “They have a lot of coaches that have been doing it for a long time.”
Elliott believes that starting kids as young as 5 years old is what makes the difference and community programs and community buy-in are necessary to make that happen.
“It’s really important to have the little guys developing,” Elliott said.
One of the common themes of success of any high school sport these days is dedication to a sport during the high school offseason and the communities that support freestyle wrestling clubs during the offseason over the years have been the ones that develop high school champions. Zabel has revived one for Snohomish. Elliott has been running one for years.
“The biggest thing is getting the high school kids to give back,” Elliott said.
Everett has seniors doing projects on coaching youth and writing papers about what they are learning. Once they move on they don’t forget how rewarding it can be and they become the next coaches and boosters themselves.
For the 2009-2010 season the conventional wisdom points toward another Lake Stevens triumph — that notion proved credible as the Vikings beat second-ranked Tahoma Saturday — but certainly there are a few other teams from the North that have and may prove to be worthy of the special title that is Wesco Champion.
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