Cashion wrestling began in a barn
Cashion Wrestling was born in a barn.
As Casey Edgeman stands in the wrestling room at Cashion High School, a converted swimming pool that doubles as the cheer room, track locker room and the baseball batting cages, more than a dozen wrestlers hit the mats learning the fine arts of rolls and grappling.
“It’s a multi-purpose room that never was intended to have wrestling,” Edgeman said. “Who knows where it’ll be 15 years down the road.”
Cashion is embarking on its first ever season of high school wrestling this year.
Thanks to Edgeman and a loyal band of interested parents and backers, wrestling has come to town.
“You are talking about a town that’s never had a wrestling culture,” Edgeman said. “So we knew getting this going was going to be an uphill battle.”
Humble might be overstating the origins.
After Edgeman and his wife moved to Cashion from the Deer Creek area a few years ago, he was surprised to find out the school didn’t offer the sport.
“I was complaining about it,” Edgeman said. “Finally my wife just said, ‘Well why don’t you do something about it.’”
Edgeman helped recruit 14 wrestlers to come try the sport out but quickly ran into a problem.
They had nowhere to practice and no mats to wrestle on.
“We had the kids,” he said. “But nowhere to go.”
Finally, a friend of the program offered his unused barn and Piedmont High School loaned out some wrestling mats to its fellow Cats.
After moving tractors and mowers out of the way, the wrestling room was ready.
Flash forward to now and Cashion has not only kept up its youth wrestling teams, but they have started finding success, boasting seven state placers last year.
The youth team has blossomed to feature nearly three dozen kids while the interest slowly trickled up to the high school ranks. Students at Cashion wanted to know when a varsity team was going to be put together.
That’s when they encountered another problem. The Wildcats would need a coach.
Edgeman was friends with former Oklahoma State wrestler Nolan Boyd, a two-time All-American and a three-time Oklahoma state champ from Deer Creek.
Boyd had just graduated from OSU in 2017, maybe he would want to take it on?
“He said no,” Edgeman said about the first time he approached Boyd. “But I kept after him and told him just come out here and check these kids out.
“See that we are building something special here.”
Boyd was sold.
“It’s the bare necessities here,” he said. “But that’s really something that excited me here. To be able to be apart of this from the beginning, that’s really exciting.”
The wrestling will be the interesting part this season for Cashion. The skill ranges of the team range from a brand new to inexperience as the Wildcats prepare to wrestle in its first tournament at Kingfisher this weekend.
Sophomore Justice Broadbent is excited by the potential of his team but even more taken with the camaraderie that’s developed in just a few short weeks.
“I feel like this is a brotherhood already,” he said. “We are really trying to build this and to do it with all these guys is really cool.”
Senior Nolan Banks has maybe the most experience on the team. Banks moved in from Piedmont where he had wrestled before and comes from a family of wrestlers that have all competed in high school.
The chance for him to add to that family legacy was too good to pass up.
“Right now it’s coming together,” Banks said. “But as soon as it comes together this is going to be a wrestling town forever.”