:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/shawmedia/QRE5EGDUHTMDMSVRPSGBEB74HM.jpg)
Only one freshman – Jack Clauson – came out for the Johnsburg high school wrestling team this season. The Skyhawks only list 22 athletes on their roster across all levels.
That struggle to draw in new talent and depth is why Jon Murphy, the high school’s third-year wrestling coach, recently wrote an email to local parents – starting “Dear future Skyhawk families” – inviting them to an open practice and forum event Monday morning that he was calling “save Johnsburg wrestling.”
One of the keys to that mission lay in the fact that the open practice was held in conjunction with a local youth team, Spartan Wrestling Club, which is only 13 months old and founded by two Johnsburg wrestling alumni, Jerad Karlen and Clay Guida.
Asked about it later, Murphy said, “I think we’re kind of facing desperate times here. And that’s kind of where I’m at, in the sense that only having one freshman wrestler come out this year it was kind of a smack to my face and kind of a wake-up call like you’ve got to start doing something to start creating a buzz here because whatever we’re doing here isn’t working.
“It’s real crucial. It’s a constant fight. One of the guys I used to work with used to say, ‘Recruiting is like personal hygiene, if you don’t do it, your team in going to stink.’ It’s so true, you’re constantly having to recruit, you’re constantly having to look down to that lower level stuff and make sure that the kids that are coming up through the system are doing the right things. Really it’s all coming down to a numbers game, everyone’s playing this numbers game and unfortunately across the board there’s a lot of teams struggling right now to get kids involved in any athletics period, but wrestling’s a really tough sell.”
The emergence of a local youth club, along with a middle school program, Murphy hopes, will combat the decline in participation.
Karlen and Guida share the belief that a youth club for kids to try the sport earlier is crucial.
“There’s always room for growth in everything,” said Guida. “So we figure if we want to get the high school back to where it was when we were wrestling, before we were wrestling, if we want to get back to being competitive again, it starts with little kids. You can’t all of a sudden expect kids to go out for a team freshman year in a sport and be successful. No, wrestling is one of those sports, Jerad and I both started when we were 6 or 7 years old, 5 years old, whatever it was.”
FRIENDS BECOME FOUNDERS
The pair grew up as friends, competitors and wrestling partners from a young age. Both had to find youth wrestling elsewhere before attending high school together at Johnsburg and moving on to wrestle at Harper College. Despite calling himself a late bloomer, Guida went on to become a professional mixed martial arts fighter, winning the inagural Strikeforce lightweight championship and now competing in the UFC.
“That’s how we met, through wrestling,” Guida said. “He beat up on me when we were little. We used to compete against each other and then we became teammates and we know it’s such a great sport that we want to give back to the sport that’s changed our lives and molded us as humans.”
Karlen said they had wanted to start some kind of club team for years but just never got around to it.
In November 2014, they “finally decided it was just time to do it,” and started Spartan Wrestling, a registered club with the Illinois Kids Wrestling Federation.
They began with about 20 kids, Karlen said, essentially all of them starting from scratch. Karlen said 12 to 14 of them finished the season, which included a limited number of tournaments, as they did so much teaching of the basics.
The team practices out of a room at Lankford Construction, where Karlen works and his father is the president. Karlen said it’s nice to be able to “pop” over and mop mats or take care of other club business when he needs a break from the office.
“It just kind of worked out that Jerad had the facility and we wanted to see Johnsburg get put back on the map for being known for something and it used to be known as a small wrestling town for a while, a decade or two decades ago,” Guida said. “Jerad and his brother were both very successful wrestlers, my brother was a successful wrestler, they were all ranked in state, a lot of our friends were very successful wrestlers. We lost that; we let the tradition die. The community let the tradition die; the school let the tradition die; and we want to build that back up.
“You know how it is, everything starts when you’re young, everything starts with a feeder program, a club program, and we’re fortunate enough that Jerad has the means to have a facility and we have the knowledge of wrestling to be able to pass that on.”
As far as either of them can remember, there never has been a youth feeder club in Johnsburg, a huge boost to the high school program. Sports such as football and soccer, and wrestling in other towns, use youth club teams to get kids into a sport, coached and developing before they even reach high school.
“If you don’t have that feeder program and you’re starting late, you come in as a freshman and you think you’re going to wrestle and compete, and these (other) kids have been doing it for 10 years already or eight years or whatever, so they’re just so far behind it’s hard to catch up for guys,” Karlen said.
GROWTH FOR CLUB AND KIDS
This year they have a steady number in the 20s with upward of 30 wrestlers at times, and Karlen said it seems like more are joining all the time.
“Every week we’re getting a couple more kids, kids hearing about us from their friends,” Karlen said. “It’s kind of cool how a lot of the … new additions are from kids that wrestled last year and they talked about it to their friends from baseball or football and other sports that they’re in and it’s kind of like their buddies now are into it. So it’s growing from that original base.”
Tracie Barger-Ancog is a Johnsburg resident and friend of Karlen’s since high school. She heard about his new club and saw it as an opportunity for her 7-year-old son, Kainoa.
“He’s interested in many activities, but between his brother and my husband, they were always wrestling on the living room carpet,” Barger-Ancog said. “So to put that energy into a good place and get some techniques that are proper and get discipline there and everything makes it better than loose energy, make it something positive.”
The Spartans practice twice a week and compete on Saturdays and Sundays. Their wrestlers range from 5-year-olds to eighth-graders. Karlen and Guida preach about the life lessons that such a difficult, demanding and individual sport can impart on the younger generation.
“Have I seen growth? Yes, absolutely,” Barger-Ancog said. “From the first year to the second year, even after his first match then I saw a lot of growth from him in putting his energy toward it and focusing on something and focusing on a goal and working toward it. He pays attention to the moves that they’re learning and he wants to practice it at home and he gets really excited about it.
“It’s something that is scary for him, too. So it’s good to see him do something that you know, on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning he doesn’t want to wake up early, and he’s a little bit scared to go and wrestle somebody because it’s all him. It’s good to see him do something that’s not just comfortable for him is also good growth for him.”
John Bush lives in Johnsburg but grew up in Algonquin, wrestling in IKWF with Crystal Lake Wizards and then at Jacobs High School. When his son, Eric, decided last year that he wanted to try wrestling, Bush was expecting to have to drive up to Richmond or somewhere else to find a youth program. Through a mutual friend on Facebook, however, he saw Karlen was starting a new club in the area and gave it a try.
Eric, 7, and in his second year with the Spartans, “absolutely loves it,” his dad said. John Bush now helps organize the club and coaches, but not Eric, because Karlen has a strict, club-wide policy about parents not directly coaching their own kids.
On Wednesday evening, the Bush family was headed to the Wisconsin Dells to celebrate New Year’s. They’re scheduled to be there until Saturday, when they will leave at 3:30 a.m. to get back for a tournament at Harper College in Palatine. Weigh-ins are from 7 to 8 a.m., wrestling starts at 9 a.m., and Eric simply wouldn’t miss it.
“Something that he wanted to do. He said, ‘Dad, no, I’d rather go to the tournament than spend an extra day up there.’ So he’s all about it. I think he’s got a great future if he keeps up that attitude.”