Scott Swanson
If local residents notice a sudden influx of athletic youths into Sweet Home beginning this weekend, there’s a reason.
Two local events, both held locally, which will attract hundreds of athletes and coaches to the community are the Santiam Wrestling Camp, which starts Saturday afternoon, and the Nike Open Water Polo Tournament, which kicks off Monday morning in Foster Lake.
The wrestling camp is the “best in the state” this year, according to Sweet Home Coach Steve Thorpe, who is one of the organizers.
This year’s camp will include all of the state’s cadet and junior qualifiers for the national tournament to be held in Fargo, N.D., this month. It also will include a Canadian team and Oregon’s cultural exchange team that is headed for New Zealand later this month. Thorpe said he expects 175-plus wrestlers and coaches.
“This is kind of like my camp used to be when it was the national team camp,” he said. “The difference this year is that we have both juniors and cadets, who used to go to separate camps.”
Sweet Home has two wrestlers, Tyler Schilling and Tyler Fincher, who have qualified for the nationals and two others, Anthony Hardee and Kobe Olson, who are set to go to New Zealand.
“This is the mandatory training camp for New Zealand,” Thorpe said.
The third annual Nike Open Water Polo Tournament is returning to Lewis Creek Park Monday through Wednesday, July 14-16, with a “maxed-out” field, according to organizers.
The tournament, the only one held on open water in the United States, is gaining popularity, said founder Steve Sessa, who coaches Willamette Valley Water Polo in Salem and Albany. It has gone from 16 teams in 2012 to 24 last year.
“It’s pretty much all the teams that came the first year, who have been back both years,” Sessa said. “It’s definitely teams coming back. They like it.”
This year’s event will have 31 boys and girls teams in 18-and-under and 16-and-under divisions.
“We will have 80 games over three days,” Sessa said. “It was not an easy schedule to make.”
The participants will come from as far away as British Columbia to the north and New Mexico to the south, with a sizable contingent from California.
“Having an international team is a nice bonus,” Sessa said.
Games will be played in two open-water “courses,” set off by docks, in Foster Lake, just to the west of the swimming area at the park. Admission is free and spectators are welcome.
The lure of the tournament, for teams that are used to competing in swimming pools, is not just the chance to play in non-chlorinated water in an open lake, but the chance to camp in Lewis Creek Park.
“I think a lot of it is the team bonding and stuff that happens because of the camping, as well as the experience of playing in the lake,” he said.
With a field of 500 athletes, plus coaches and parents, there will be a few challenges, like making sure games progress according to schedule, he said.
“It’s not like a swimming pool, where you can turn on the lights and keep playing. There are no lights to turn on.”
The tournament could grow, Sessa said, if more docks can be procured.
“I hope the town of Sweet Home is ready,” he said. “We’re going to have well over 1,000 people over three days.”
Thorpe said the wrestlers at his camp will have free time to circulate around town, but the emphasis will be on wrestling.
Since he became chair of the state’s USA Wrestling program in summer 2010, Thorpe said, membership in Oregon has risen from 2,800 to more than 7,000.
“We have the fifth-largest U.S. Wrestling participation in the nation and the largest per-capita for our size,” he said.
He said the camp, which started in 2001, has three goals: to bring the state’s best wrestlers to Sweet Home and give local wrestlers a chance to train with them, and to build wrestling in the state and provide opportunities for other youngsters throughout the state to improve their skills.
“This is the doggone best camp in the state. We don’t set out to make a lot of money. But where else are you going to have, like we did last year, Canadians, South Africans and Oregonians training together?”