Sweet Home alum donates to help wrestlers

This screenshot shows Sweet Home wrestling alums in college getting the news about the scholarships.

Seven Sweet Home alumni who are wrestling in college got a shock over Christmas break.

It was a good shock.

Their former coach, Steve Thorpe, summoned them to a Zoom meeting in which he informed them that they were all recipients of a brand new scholarship, donated by an unnamed alumnus.

“I was contacted last spring by a Sweet Home alumnus who told me what wrestling did for him in his life,” Thorpe said. This particular alum graduated from Sweet Home after wrestling for Norm Davis, Thorpe’s predecessor, and moved on to a college wrestling career.

“He’s taken the values of wrestling and used them throughout his life,” Thorpe said. “He wanted to support kids who were going off to school and wrestling with some form of scholarship.”

Thorpe said he and the alum discussed the options and the donor decided to establish a Graybeard Scholarship Fund that would give $20,000 a year, equally split between Sweet Home students who were enrolled and wrestling in college and in good standing.

“He wants to support you,” Thorpe said he told the students.

This year the money is being divided into two $10,000 payments, which will be equally divided between the recipients at the end of the two semester terms and adjusted accordingly for students on the quarter system.

“We’re not going to give it up front,” Thorpe said. “We don’t want kids to get that scholarship, then quit within a few weeks. We have some of those.”

Thorpe described the donor as “one of the most humble people you will know. He just wanted to support the Sweet Home wrestling program.”

He said that the fund, which will be called the Graybeard Foundation, will be set up to accept donations from others who want to contribute.

The students were “dumbfounded” when he told them, Thorpe said.

“That’s close to a $1,500 check for these kids. I know what it means for these kids. They’re buying food. They’re paying rent on top of everything else.

“Kobe Olson (a 2017 alum who is winding up his wrestling career at Eastern Oregon University) told me, ‘This goes a long way for me. I’ve got big boy bills.’”

Thorpe said the donation is a testament to how the sport changes lives.

“It speaks volumes to me on how people, long, long after they’ve wrestled their last match, still see the value in it. If kids know now that, going into college, they have someone ‘who will support me,’ that’s one check off one of those burdens that they have.”

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