Scott Swanson
Eight state team titles. Thirty-eight conference championships. Forty-four individual state champions. Three hundred and forty-two state placewinners.
There’s no question that wrestling has put Sweet Home on the map, not just in Oregon but well beyond the state line.
It wasn’t always that way.
In fact, prior to 1953 the only organized wrestling in Sweet Home was – well, the school had a tumbling team in 1952, and some of its members started traveling to Lebanon because they wanted to learn to wrestle.
The Huskies’ first success came once Coach Rod Harmon, the school’s first “real wrestling coach,” as current coach Steve Thorpe puts it, arrived and started a team during the 1953-54 school year. Success was not instantaneous – Sweet Home finished 28th, last in the state that first year, with zero points at the state championships.
In 1955 Larry Sommers took fourth in the state, putting some points on the board for the Huskies, but in 1956 Sweet Home put Sommers and Ernie Baxter in the finals, Sommers winning the school’s first title – at 136 pounds. Baxter was state runner-up at 168, giving Sweet Home seventh place as a team.
By the following year, things really gelled and the Huskies were second overall, with two state champions – Bill Keller at 98 and Lynn Garrett at 148.
Notably, an assistant coach named Bob Majors had joined the staff that year. In 1958 he took over as head coach and that season the Huskies won their first-ever conference title and followed that up by winning state behind Dave Payne’s individual championship at 98 pounds. At that time, all the high schools in the state competed in the state tournament, so the Huskies were top dog in the entire state.
Sweet Home placed second the next year, in what was now the large-school division after the state was divided into two tournaments.
It was a major step for Sweet Home sports, the team’s success described by The New Era of those days as a “meteoric rise.”
But the Huskies were back on top in 1960 under newly arrived Coach George Meyers, who took over after Majors moved to Portland to seek care for his wife, who had cancer. He started coaching at David Douglas High School, where he won the state title in 1961.
“Bob Majors once told me he was only successful because he had hard-working kids,” Thorpe said. “He had these Okies who didn’t know anything but tough – local kids who went home after practice and did chores.”
Meyers’ success came from that core, as Sweet Home had three individual titlists in 1960 – Bill Lynn (106), Jerry Lynn (98) and John Gaskey (115) who led the Huskies to their second state championship, leading five other wrestlers who all placed at state.
Majors had left Meyers a team full of “powerhouse kids,” recalled Bill Lynn, who now lives in Salem.
“We were with all the big schools. We handled the big teams pretty easily.”
The numbers bear that out. When the Huskies took state under Meyers, they beat second-place Gresham 79-39.
That prompted the state wrestling powers to modify the scoring system, Lynn said.
Majors was the key, he said.
“Bob Majors taught us what we knew. He was small, a 140-pound guy, so he’d get out on the mat with everybody. George Meyers was a heavyweight. He couldn’t do that.”
Also key to their success were experience and talent, Lynn said.
“When I went up there as a freshman, there were three state champions in the first two or three weights on the team. When you get that kind of talent working you over every night in practice, you either get good or get out. We had a lot of talent.
“Ken Eberhard, Dave Payne, Bill Keller – they were just animals. It just kind of grew on everybody.”
That kind of talent and depth made for some brutally tough competition, he said.
“We had guys who didn’t make it to state because there was so much talent (in the league) and they just took two guys. We had guys who could have placed fourth in state that stayed home.”
He cited his older brother as an example of Sweet Home’s power in the light weights. When Jerry Lynn started wrestling as a freshman, Eberhard and Keller were upperclassmen.
“Jerry stayed at 98 and, as a senior, he took state,” Bill Lynn said.
Sweet Home was third in 1962 as Bill Lynn and Gaskey repeated as champions, Lynn beating Eberhard in the 106-pound finals, the first time two Sweet Home wrestlers had faced each other for the state championship – something that would not be repeated until 2017, when Kobe Olson beat freshman teammate Travis Thorpe for the 126-pound title.
The program began a steep decline following 1963 and three years later had reached its nadir, Meyers leaving in 1966, the year the Huskies did not score a point and the first of five years in which they did not win a match at state, tying for last in the team standings.
“They had a PE teacher running it for at least one year,” Thorpe noted.
Change began when Norm Davis arrived in the fall of 1969 from Idaho, where he had been an accomplished college football player before beginning his coaching career in wrestling and football.
“Bob Majors started the wrestling culture in Sweet Home,” Thorpe said. “Norm Davis brought it back. It was a new way of thinking in Sweet Home athletics, not just in wrestling. It was a new sense of integrity and dedication and commitment.
“I asked him one time why he stopped coaching football and he told me he thought he could have a greater impact on kids’ lives as a wrestling coach.
“He put a finger in my face one time when I was an assistant coach and told me this was more than just about making wrestlers. It was about making young men.”
Meanwhile, in Sweet Home the wrestling culture was growing across the landscape.
Local wrestlers were beginning to compete in the off-season, in freestyle and Greco styles.
The Sweet Home Mat Club was founded in 1974 by Wayne Thorpe, who had wrestled for Majors in 1958, Bill Lynn and Jeff Murphy.
They got permission to use the gym at Foster School, where they put down Fold-a-Mats and an old horsehair mat, Steve Thorpe recalled.
“Rich Adams had an old Suburban and he bought a couple more folding mats and they’d lay those down and we’d practice wrestling. We went to a couple of tournaments in Scio.
The club grew fast – to 100 kids, so they moved to the Junior High.
In 1969, the year Davis arrived, the state was re-divided into three divisions, with the Huskies still in the large-school AAA tournament. They were 16th that year, but by 1976 they were back on top, winning the school’s third state title.
With the OSAA dividing the state’s schools into even more school-size categories, going to five in 2007, Sweet Home finished on top or on the podium frequently.
But it wasn’t just equalized competition.
“In our program, there was accountability,” Thorpe said. “There had to be a level of commitment, doing the extra, and hard, hard work.
“Norm was not a technician. He just made kids tough. There was no fancy about a Sweet Home wrestler and today there’s no fancy in Sweet Home. We’re going to fight you in the middle of the mat and we’re going to score. And as long as you think you’re in the match, you’re still in the match. I’ve told my wrestlers that for 30 years.
“I still, to this day, say in my parents meeting what Norm said to us: ‘Every day they are going to be challenged and pushed. We are going to be honest and truthful with kids. We may not always say what they want to hear, but we will say what they need to hear.’ That’s what Norm did and that’s what we do.”
Davis coached nearly 70 individual placewinners during his 27 years at the helm for Sweet Home, including state champions Dennis Christiansen (1975, 146), Bill Anderson (1976, 106), Uriel Santana (1980, 106), Troy Santana (1984, 123), Manuel Santana (1986, 106), Mike Murphy (1986 and ’87, 148), Scott McCandless (1989, 112), Shane Cochran (1989, 135), and, in Davis’ last year, 1995, Bryan Coulter (134), Eugene Luke (215) and Nathan Rice (185). His teams placed five more times at state after the 1976 championship.
“That was when you qualified two out of each weight and we were in the toughest conference in the state, the Capital Conference,” Thorpe said. Now four wrestlers from each conference qualify for state, which gives teams a chance to get more wrestlers to state.
Davis was “so ahead of his time” in a variety of ways, in motivating young people, in organization, Thorpe said.
Sweet Home wrestlers now exit the dressing room and circle the mat to driving music bursting from the PA system. Davis’ wrestlers circled the mat to music too, from a record player blaring out the Eagles’ “Somebody’s Going to Hurt Somebody.”
Sweet Home wrestlers wear white socks until they win 15 matches, then they get to wear green and gold. That’s a Davis innovation as well.
“Socks became your motivation,” said Thorpe, who wrestled for the Huskies from 1983-86. “That was ahead of his time.”
Davis recruited Thorpe from Lebanon to return to Sweet Home as an assistant, and the success has continued. His teams have won 22 conference titles and five state championships (1998, 1999, 2007, 2009 and 2017), and have trophied 13 more times, with 161 placewinners over that 24-year span. They include state champions Nathan Rice (1996, 215), Clint Sieminski (1997, 1998 and 1999), Kevin Lummus (1998, 125), Andy Ellis (2000, 275), David Helfrich (2002, 171), Trevor Tagle (2006, 140), Kris Newport (2008 and 2011), Brock Crocker (2010, 152), Colton Schilling (2010, 2011 and 2013), Tyler Cowger (2013, 152), Wade Paulus (2013, 195), Kobe Olson (2016, 2017), Jackson Royer (2019, 2020), and Travis Thorpe (2019, 2020).
In addition to picking up where Davis left off, Thorpe said he re-established the Mat Club, which had fallen into decline by the time he returned to Sweet Home. Many of the coaches are former Sweet Home greats.
“One of the greatest things I’ve done is surround myself over the years with great coaches,” Thorpe said. “When you’re coaching these kids at the age of 5 years old through high school, there’s no surprises. They know the system.”
Lynn said the quality of wrestling in Oregon has increased dramatically, thanks to the early start most of today’s athletes get on the mat.
“We didn’t see a wrestling mat until our freshman year,” he said. “We were wrestling seniors. Some of these kids are amazing. Some of the high school wrestlers now look like college kids 25 years ago. And some of the college kids look like Olympic wrestlers.”
Sweet Home’s success in wrestling is built on ownership in the program – from top to bottom, and extending across generations.
“Norm Davis never called it a team. He called it a family,” said Thorpe, who frequently describes the program as exactly that. Like any healthy family, he said, it requires sacrifice.
“You cannot have a successful program without sacrifice. My family has sacrificed for me. Donna Davis and the Davis family sacrificed for Norm.
“I think, historically, the thing about a Sweet Home wrestler is they’re going to be willing to compete. They are going to have trust and belief in a staff that that they’re going to be prepared.
“Numbers don’t lie. We’re not just one of the most successful teams in our division. We’re one of the finest and most successful teams in the history of Oregon.”