New Brookside coach ready for opportunity

When Brian Behrendt stepped down as Brookside’s head wrestling coach last month after 11 years, his longtime assistant Seth Houston took over the job.

Houston was the assistant coach for the past eight years and has seen Behrendt build up the program from scratch.

Now he hopes to carry on a program he’s familiar with.

“I know what I’m getting myself into,” Houston said. “We have some talented young men coming back. The majority of our lineup is coming back. We’ve lost a few guys. Two very good ones. It’s a nice situation to take over a team that you’ve worked with and you know the guys.”

Behrendt decided to walk away due to health issues, and would often joke around during the season that he was getting too old.

Houston had a hunch that he would leave, but was skeptical at the same time.

“I knew he would step down,” he said. “But in my head, I kept saying to myself that he’ll never retire. He had talked to me right at the beginning of the season and said, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this.’ He’s a guy that went on at full throttle his whole life and it just beats you up. Up until last year, he was trying to wrestle still and it was getting harder and harder. After his wife, I was probably the first person he talked to about it. Then after the state finals, we sat down and he said that he’s done.”

Houston wrestled in high school at Avon Lake and was a three-time conference champion, two-time state qualifier and accumulated over 90 career wins. In his senior year in college at Baldwin Wallace, he was ranked No. 10 nationally as a heavyweight. Houston coached at Avon Lake, Midview, North Olmsted and then Brookside and would do volunteer work helping wrestlers around the area in between.

With that type of experience under his belt, he was able to also pick Behrendt’s brain during the past eight years and wants to apply that.

“One of the things I learned from Brian was to check your pride at the door,” he said. “It’s not about you, it’s about the kids. And that’s one of the things as a young coach you don’t always have. Really, a couple of guys taught me that and the other is Dave Dlugosz (Avon Lake football coach). I tend to lean on the people I worked with. I try to think back to situations and how they used to handle it, what results they got out of it.”

Houston is the youngest of six siblings, and he recalls when his father, who loved football, read an article of how wrestling improves football skills. He encouraged Houston’s second oldest brother to wrestle and he did so in the Army for a few years.

When Houston was growing up, he began working out with his brother and told himself that if he could finish moves on his brother, he could do it on most high school wrestlers.

“But it wasn’t really like a family sport,” he added. “Football was more of the family sport.”

Brookside had a state qualifier last year for the first time in 21 years when junior Brad Huhn qualified in the Division III 113-pound class. It was a breakthrough moment for the program and now Houston wants to see it become a trend.

“Several years ago, I talked to Brian and we thought about what we need to do and what hurdles to get over,” Houston said.

“And one of them was we need to be a competitive team at the conference level and have a competitive presence at the state level. That was our last hurdle we needed to get over so our guys can see that is an attainable goal.

“The level of work Brad puts in, it can translate to the other guys. I tell our guys that the difference between goodness and greatness is work. If you’re willing to work, greatness is achievable.”

Houston