Desoto Co.’s first wrestling club has arrived
Sport long shunned in Miss. is making inroads
“That’s my first time wrestling in four years,” Collin Clagg said as he came off of the Desoto County wrestling club mats. “It felt good.”
Clagg, who is 18 and a senior at Hernando High School, moved to Mississippi from West Virginia four years ago. Once he moved to Mississippi, his wrestling career was forced to an end. For a long time, Mississippi was the only state in the nation to not have high school-sanctioned wrestling.
In 2021, Mississippi sanctioned the sport and nine schools in the state, including Center Hill in Desoto, fielded a team for the first wrestling season. Tyler Knox predicts that up to five more schools in Desoto could be starting teams for the second season.
“I’ve been here since 2012,” Knox, the treasurer of the Mississippi Wrestling Federation, said. “...since 2012 to now, me and a group of guys have been trying to get wrestling going in Mississippi. It’s taken about 10 years, but we’re finally here.”
The Mississippi Wrestling Federation was born after petitioning schools to start teams didn’t work. The Federation, a nonprofit, raises the money to buy the mats needed to start wrestling for the schools
“That was the biggest problem we ran into,” Knox said. “Schools were like ‘we don’t have the money to start the program.’ And wrestling is great because it is a cheap program. The majority of your money is in [the mat]. So $10,000 to get a new mat but then the school gets to keep the mat for ten years.”
Recently, Knox had another occasion to raise the money to buy a mat- he’s starting the very first wrestling club in Desoto County. The hope, Knox said, is that the more younger kids in Desoto get interested in wrestling, the more high schools will follow suit and start teams as well.
The club, which officially began practice at the start of this week, had 21 wrestlers sign up, 19 youth wrestlers and three cadet wrestlers. The youth wrestlers range in age from three to 12 and the cadet wrestlers are ages 13 through 18. Some of them have never wrestled before and some, like Clagg, were forced to quit the sport when they moved to Mississippi.
“When I got the call and told that this was going to be happening, I got in my car fast as I could and got down here,” Clagg said. “It’s something I’m very excited about. I’m excited to get back on the mat and see how it feels.”
The practices take place in what used to be the storage room for Conxion Gym Hernando. Knox and Benjamin Hardy, another advocate for wrestling in Mississippi cleaned out the room, painted the walls and bought a $3000 mat to spread across the floor. The mat had to be picked up from the Mississippi coast and transported the ten hours back up to Desoto, but should last the club for ten to fifteen years.
“Bringing whatever we can into the state, I’m 100% for,” Hardy said. “But also giving back to the community, I think is a huge part of what we’re doing here. Bringing opportunities that haven’t been in the state since the early ‘90s.”
The Desoto County Wrestling Club will be hosting practices and, while they aren’t building a competitive team, they will be assisting any players who want to in competing against the four other clubs in the state and the clubs outside the state.
“I know the guy in Oxford really well,” Knox said. “Once we get up and going and have a couple of practices under our belt, he’s going to bring his kids down here and we’re going to have a little match. But there’s youth tournaments all over, not in Mississippi obviously because we’re still new, but its huge in Tennessee, huge in Alabama, huge in Louisiana, Georgia and Arkansas, so we’re going to take these kids that want to compete to them and if they don’t want to compete against other kids, they don’t have to.”
Knox wrestled growing up and still credits the sport as one of the main things that built his character and prepared him for adulthood.
“I love wrestling, I’ve been doing it since I was a kid,” Knox said. “This is the only sport, in my opinion, that prepares kids, boys and girls, to be adults. There’s no excuses when you get onto the matt. It’s a team sport, but it’s still an individual sport. You’re on the mat by yourself against another person. So, you find out real quick if you’ve put in the energy and time. If you’ve put in the hours to train, you find out real quick. You can be on a football team and say ‘well so and so missed a block’ or ‘so and so dropped the ball’ and you have that excuse. You don’t have an excuse in wrestling.”
Knox would wrestle during the football offseason and has found that framing wrestling as a training mechanism for football players is a useful strategy when he talks to schools who might be interested in starting a wrestling team. Because of the emphasis so many Mississippi schools place on football, Knox will often talk to the football coaches prior to the athletic directors.
“Let me make your football players better for you, is basically my pitch now,” Knox said. “I show them, there’s a list of hall of fame football players who wrestled in high school. Most notable name is Ray Lewis. Ray Lewis is a twotime, three-time, Florida state champion. And what you notice about Ray Lewis, when you dive down interviews, he always credits wrestling for his success. Because, what’s a double leg takedown? It’s a tackle.”
Looking towards the start of next season, Knox and Hardy predict that as many as 32 schools could be hosting teams for the 2022 season.
“It’s huge, the impact it’s had on the kids so far, and the adults and the schools even,” Hardy said. “The first couple of matches we went to [last season], a sprinkling of people attended and by the end it was full teams and you go to some of these schools that are really supporting it and you have 60, 70 maybe 100 people in the stands watching, so it was huge. It’s a huge thing for the state of Mississippi and it’s a huge thing for the youth of Mississippi.”
For now, Knox is looking forward to the first Desoto County Wrestling Club season.
“Wrestling is the oldest recorded martial art. It dates back to the first Olympic games,” Knox said. “My plan is to come in here and tell kids ‘hey, you want to compete, we can get you to compete. If you just want to learn how to wrestle, we can teach you how to wrestle.’”
Gina Butkovich can be reached at 901-232-6714 or on Twitter @gigibutko.