UP OFF THE MAT

Columbiana Wrestling

Gallery

By BRIAN DZENIS

bdzenis@vindy.com

COLUMBIANA

Asked to relive the early years of Columbiana wrestling, heavyweight Tim Davin paused and said, “Oh man.”

In 2011, the team was making a comeback after folding in 1989 with just five wrestlers.

“We were bounced around a lot because of the minimal amount of people we brought,” Davin said. “We worked with what we could, but going to tournaments, it was pretty bad.

“We would go out and just get destroyed by these teams that had 20 or more kids and it just wasn’t a good experience.”

After four years of taking their lumps, the Clippers wrestling team’s reboot is showing results. With four wrestlers gaining state attention and its first winning season in the recent program history, the team is close to sending its first wrestler to Columbus in 30 years.

“This has been a really fun year for us, as you’re coaching,” Clippers coach Chris Canale said. “When you’re having a bad year, it feels like the longest season and this [season] has been going by pretty quick for us and we’re enjoying it.”

OLD COLUMBIANA

The previous edition of the Clippers lasted from 1971-89. According to the most recent edition of the OHSAA wrestling media guide, the Clippers had 13 state placers, none of which finished lower than fourth and include three state titles.

Mark Rubish won back-to-back titles in 1978 and 1979, and Brian R. Pearl won the 126-pound title in 1987. He and Brian Yoor, a fourth-place finisher, are the last Clippers to compete in a state tournament.

Pearl’s father, current assistant coach Brian Pearl, held the same role with the team in the ‘80s. He was on then head-coach Jim Daley’s staff from 1983-87. Daley was the team’s junior high coach before taking over.

“When he moved up to the high school job, we had a hard time finding somebody to take that junior high spot,” Pearl said. “Consequently numbers decreased significantly and when we left, there weren’t enough kids with experience to continue the program.”

Pearl said numbers dumped during the Daley era as they struggled to find replacement coaches for the junior high level. After the younger Pearl’s title, Daley and Pearl moved on to other jobs and the team folded two years later.

In the current team’s wrestling room, there’s little signage for the ‘70s and ‘80s teams. Any team records on their wall are from the current era.

“We obviously want to bring the program to the highest level that we can and we work hard to do that and we want to get as many state placers and champions as we can, but looking at the history of Columbiana and knowing the success, it’ll be tough to get to that level,” Pearl said.

THE REBUILD

As the years went by, Pearl said he thought about reviving the program at various points, but it never came to fruition.

“I considered it, but I was getting older and I wasn’t sure I could do it myself,” Pearl said.

In comes Canale, a Canfield graduate with family in Columbiana with excellent credentials in the sport. He was a state placer with the Cardinals, a two-time NCAA qualifier and All-American at Ashland and he wrestled internationally for two years. Canale served as an assistant coach at Hubbard and Canfield before starting the Columbiana project.

He made his first call to then-athletic director and current football coach Bob Spaite to pitch bring the team. While he and school superintendent Don Mook — who was a former high school wrestler at Boardman — were supportive in spirit, the funding wasn’t there right away. Canale had his team, but it had to be self-funded. The school provided no buses or wrestling room.

“I coached for free for four years, but I knew it was worth it in the end,” Canale said.

Initially, Canale wanted to have just a middle school team to develop some talent before jumping into high school competition, but some of those first youth wrestlers had older siblings that wanted a shot. He didn’t want the interest to go to waste.

“We weren’t sure when we were going to go high school, but I had kids who were interested so I thought ‘let’s go with it,’” Canale said. “Let’s roll the dice, take some lumps and see where this goes.”

Lumps were taken. In the first season of high school competition, Canale had to utilize some of his college contacts to find opponents to play and that meant sometimes traveling as far as Columbus just to be handily beaten.

“You have a month to prepare these guys for a season and they’re facing kids that have wrestled in second and third grade,” Canale said. “We took a beating. The first year at the EOWL, we didn’t score any points and we were in the basement. Now, we’re contending for a division title every year.”

It took three years for the Clippers before current seniors Davin and Caleb Rupert were the team’s first district qualifiers.

Off the field milestones were being met as well. The school came around with funding and Canale was given a head coaching contract and converted classroom as a wrestling room. That room doubled in size last summer after the school gave Canale permission to knock down a wall into another classroom. Canale and some of his friends provided the equipment and labor for the renovation.

“It was something that when it started, I didn’t think we’d have the advantage to finish,” Davin said. “It just didn’t seem like we had any support and out of nowhere our entire school board is supporting us. It’s amazing.”

THE CASE FOR STATE

The Clippers have put themselves on the map with their first winning season in recent program history, compiling a 6-3 dual-meet record.

The four wrestlers who have earned state-ranked status are Rupert (182), Davin (285) and sophomores Nate Whitehead (170) and Brandt Virden (106). To get to Columbus, they have to navigate the sectional tournament — which starts Friday— and then place in the top four in the Garfield Heights district tournament.

“It’s going to be this year or next,” Davin said. “We’re getting there.”

The Ohio high school wrestling ranking outlets seem to agree as they’ve put out their district-by-district predictions. Between Boro Fan and InterMat, the two sites have all four wrestlers within those top six wrestlers for their district with a good chance of getting out of Garfield Heights.

“They don’t matter a whole lot, but looking at the guys we’ve beat, we have a good chance of getting two or three guys there,” Whitehead said.

Rupert and Davin are returning district placers, taking fifth and sixth last year, respectively. Rupert, who dropped from 195 midway through the season, has been ranked as high as fifth in the state for Division III. He owns all but one of the schools records in the Canale era.

“I like being the guy that the younger kids look up to and I don’t want the records to get in my head and make me overconfident,” Rupert said. “There hasn’t been anyone setting records before, so I just want to make it harder for the next person.”

Whitehead, a transfer from Canfield, missed half of the season because of state rules, but in a short amount of time he’s competed, he put a pretty nice feather in his cap. Earlier this month, Whitehead made the EOWL finals, losing to the state’s No. 1 wrestler in Division II, David Crawford, by pin.

“It was pretty good,” Whitehead said of the experience. “I knew going in I didn’t have a whole lot to lose and I just focused on wrestling and tried my hardest because I was wrestling someone who was better than me.”

THE UPSET

This year was the first year Columbiana had enough wrestlers to compete in state dual competition and the Clippers made quite the first impression, upsetting the No. 1 seed in their bracket, Harrison Central, 45-30.

“I knew we could beat them and I preached to them that we could beat them. I kept saying we can do it,” Canale said. “The negative of that was we burned a lot of energy in excitement and we lost right after that.”

The achievement was soured by what happened next, a 40-39 defeat to rival Crestview. The Inter-Tri County League’s collapse has made the relationship between the two schools frosty and that played out on the mat. Columbiana was dropped from Crestview’s regular season slate this year.

“Not getting a chance to dual them this year was a little bit of a cut to the throat,” Davin said. “Honestly, I felt like it gave us what we needed when we wrestled them in state duals.

“We needed it and it wasn’t there.”

THE NEXT MILESTONE

When Canale was wrestler, he competed in the first state tournament at the Jerome Schottenstein Center on Ohio State’s campus. Should one of his players go there in March, he knows what advice to give.

“If you’re afraid of heights, you know how they say ‘don’t look down?’ The first time you walk out that tunnel, don’t look up,” he said.

Canale said he never dumbed down or toned down his program in the name of increasing numbers and nearly five years later, the team is back on track.

“We had 20-plus kids come out when we started and a lot of programs, what they’ll do is they’ll make practices easy to keep the kids around, but what you end up doing is cheating the kids like Caleb, Nate or Tim because they don’t get pushed,” Canale said. “I’m not trying to run anybody out because our sport needs numbers, but this sport teaches you that whoever works the hardest is going to excel.”

And wrestling is a sport that rewards work, whether the resources are there or not.

“It’s a select sport, and if you’ve got it, you got it,” Davin said.