Interview #33: The Wrestling Coach
Kyle Timberlake, Torrance, CA
Intro
Kyle Timberlake is a high school wrestling coach living in Torrance, California, which is on the coast about 20 miles south of Los Angeles. He’s been successful, leading his teams to league championships multiple times. There’s a little bit of baseball in here, but not so much talk about his favorite team, the Angels, as you’ll see why soon.
What I got most out of this interview was first, learning a lot about wrestling, both the sport and the culture surrounding it. I knew very little about actual wrestling, not the WWE version where Stone Cold Steven Austin pours beers down his throat and then whacks somebody with a folding chair. Second, this is a good example of how multiple sports help athletes, and regular kids, in more beneficial ways than just specializing in one sport year-round. He talks about how hand-eye sports like baseball, endurance sports like soccer and physical sports like football all helped his wrestling skills while at the same time, at least in the case of football, upped his game there as well.
Are you still into baseball?
I grew up playing Little League. I like going to baseball games, but I don't really follow professional sports.
Who's your team?
Angels.
How's that been going?
Owner sucks. Sucked forever. You have two generational talents pissed away, so.
Have you been an Angels fan since you were a kid?
I grew up being an Angels fan. My dad was an Angels fan. During the home run race (in 1998) between McGwire and Sosa, the Angels traded away my favorite player, Jim Edmonds. So the Cardinals had Jim Edmonds and Mark McGwire and I was like, I guess I’m a Cardinals fan now. So I switched over to the Cardinals for a while. And then once both of them retired, I kind of held on to it. After a while, I'm like, why am I still a Cardinals fan? So I'm an Angels fan again.
Has the team being crap had anything to do with you not paying as much attention?
No. In general, I don't really follow professional sports that hard. I coach high school wrestling and with my involvement in that I get so much more out of watching the people I'm coaching and work with that professional sports or college sports don't really interest me.
I’ll give Kyle a happy Angels memory here:
How far did you go with baseball?
I did the summer program before my freshman year of high school. The baseball coach at the time really favored the Torrance American Baseball Pony League (TAB) team that was local and I went to the other Little League team. He basically had a policy of, if you weren't playing at TAB, good luck getting on the team.
I kind of lost interest in baseball after going through that. I was an All-Star multiple times in the league, so I probably could have played high school baseball. I played soccer and baseball growing up from age 5 to right before high school, and I was done with soccer, people were flopping around and stuff like that. I was a rough kid. I like hitting, so that didn't go well for soccer. And the baseball coach being what he was, I wasn't interested in playing baseball. And my dad said, what about wrestling? Tried it out and I'm here now. So it worked out.
So that if that coach hadn't been such a dick?
I might have still done wrestling. I might have just went to baseball.
It sounds like at least you would have played freshman year.
Yeah, for sure.
Before that summer, were you still into playing or were you drifting towards other sports?
I played on a couple club teams. I did alright. My batting wasn't great, but I was a really good fielder. I hit puberty later than most other kids. My freshman year, I was 5’6”, 140 lbs. When I was a senior, I was 6’1”, 220. So most of the freshmen are already hitting that puberty side and getting bigger and stronger and I was lagging behind. I think it's, in retrospect, one of the (reasons).
What did you enjoy about baseball?
For me, baseball’s just one of those things I did since I was a little kid. It was a part of me, right? I had never thought about leaving baseball. I always liked playing it. One of the biggest drivers for me when I was in Little League was I wanted to make the All-Star team. I wanted to prove that I was one of the top guys. I wanted to be somebody the other coaches wanted on their team. What drove me the most in baseball was I wanted to be out there and be one of the best people doing it.
And was it the same in football and soccer?
Soccer I didn't like as much, especially when I got moved over to midfield. I liked playing defense, and when I went to midfield and I had to run the entire time, I didn't like that. Football was the same thing. It's something that my dad drilled into to me as a kid, and it's something I still appreciate now, is I want the respect of my peers and people who are knowledgeable about what's going on. I could give two shits about what the people outside of that sphere think about me. So when I played football, for all the voting and stuff on who's the best, everyone I played against, all the coaches were like, that guy's awesome.
But you’d read the newspapers and I wasn't mentioned very often and I didn't care about that. All I cared about was that the people around me knew that I was a danger, that I was the person to watch out for, and I always liked the quiet professional side of things where I'm not going to go out there and toot my horn and beat my chest. I'm going to go out there and do what I do and you're going to notice because what I'm doing is above what everyone else is doing.
Well baseball and wrestling seem a little similar in that they’re individual matchups. There's still a team aspect. So you had that individual drive early on then?
Yeah, but I'm big on team sports. I'm always more motivated if there's other people involved. Wrestling, even though it’s one person on the mat at a time, there's a team around you. There’s practice that’s involving the team. Baseball, I think part of what's nice about it is you have that one-on-one match up with the batter and the pitcher, but you also have the team aspect. I like being part of a team, but I want to be able to show what I can do as well.
Wrestling Coach Career
How long have you been coaching wrestling?
Over a decade.
What got you into coaching?
My junior year of high school, I blew my ACL out wrestling. Got surgery, played through my senior year of football, but I couldn't wear the knee brace in wrestling, and I had gotten some more injuries from football that season. I had to make a choice between, you know, do I want to have a broken body and maybe push through my senior year or live a semi-pain-free life as an adult? So I chose not to wrestle my senior year. But at the time, the team was very small. I had knowledge and experience that I could give back, so I started coaching just because and stuck with it ever since.
Same school?
Yep, been with the same school the entire time. And our program’s gone from, not even in contention to win league, to being in California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Finals five out of the past six years and winning four of them.
What are some of the biggest achievements you’ve had while coaching?
The CIF championships were huge. We won four of them in a row. The big thing for me is I've become the girls head coach now as well, and girls wrestling has become the fastest growing sport in the country. There's a lot of scholarship opportunities from becoming NCAA recognized and I think in like two years it'll be an official NCAA sport.
In California, girls wrestling used to be coed. And a couple of years ago they made it boys and girls. So I've been the one going to the tournaments with the girls and this year we've had enough girls to justify having separate practices. I'm in a position where I get to create that program. We just had our end-of-year banquet on Thursday and had my first group of seniors. I like to build a relationship with my wrestlers where I get to hear about what they've done since they've gotten out of high school, whether they’re wrestling or not, just keep in touch. One of them just got back from a scholarship out in Nebraska and he’s come back to coach and teach with me.
Beyond the team awards and the program been able to build from zero to a powerhouse program in the area, I get the proof that I'm making the world a little bit better. I get to interact with the kids and see them become adults and see them succeed. I'm somebody that they lean on outside of wrestling.
What brought about the growth of women’s wrestling?
There's a female wrestler called Helen Maroulis. There's a movie that came out about her. She's the first US woman (wrestler) to ever win a medal in the Olympics, and she won gold in wrestling. I also think the sport not being coed anymore helped a lot. I think that was the biggest indication because throughout my years of wrestling we’d get like one or two girls every couple of years, but there's very few girls that want to wrestle boys. As soon as there was a separate path with girls’ tournaments and girls’ practice, being able to compete against somebody of like ability and size really boosted numbers.
I went to a couple meets at Cal Poly and I had no idea how the scoring worked but the crowd was going crazy for our star wrestler.
That's one of the things that hurts and helps the wrestling coach is that most parents have no clue what's going on. So you don't have much interference from them. At the same time, even though we're the most successful program in our school as far as championships, most of the school doesn't even know we exist or care. The wrestling programs are generally kind of, at least on the West Coast, pushed off the side in a lot of cases.
I always heard that like the PAC-10 used to be pretty important.
Title IX really hurt it. But what's interesting now is with girls wrestling become popular again and being NCAA recognized, Title IX is now saving some boys wrestling programs in college. Wrestling programs at college level, they don't really make money, but they're not costing schools money either. There aren’t a whole lot of upkeep costs compared to other sports programs. And if you have a girls team, they are a separate season than the boys teams, you have the same coaching staff and the same facilities to cover that.
So you’ve noticed the pool of girls wanting to try wrestling growing?
It's significantly increased. If you look up internationally, there's a lot of up-and-coming stars competing internationally that were never there before for girls wrestling. Men's wrestling has always had that level of competition, but it just never picked up for women until now.
Do the girls stick with wrestling or do they dip into other combat/grappling sports?
Women’s mixed martial arts (MMA) is still, technique-wise, you can see it's 20 years behind the guys. I haven't seen a whole lot of transitions between women in wrestling going over to MMA. And men's MMA, a majority of them have a wrestling background as their first combat sport or grappling sport and then they learn the striking and things like that.
It seems like a lot of the women now are kickboxers. There's an up-and-coming person who just fought in UFC 300 who was a judoka (Kayla Harrison), she had two gold medals and looks like the super-dominant judoka for American. She was top for a long time and made the transition recently to MMA. So we'll see how that goes.
Is there an advantage either way? If you came in as a grappler/wrestler versus a striker or a kickboxer or boxer?
Generally if wrestling’s your primary sport, it's much easier to transition than if you go from a different sport. Wrestling covers a lot of the bases of MMA. You have the weight cutting part, the weight class part. Wrestling’s a lot more cardiovascular intensive where it's a constant motion kind of thing and jujitsu, oftentimes, it's more of a sit and wait game of setting up traps and stuff like that. So when you go in the MMA, that style doesn't always transition very well. Wrestling seems to fit MMA better.
Boxing is a whole different thing, but learning how to kick and strike people isn't as difficult as learning how to grapple. There's definitely skill. Throwing a punch is something a lot of people can learn relatively easy. To do it well and at the right time is a whole different thing. But learning how to pick somebody up who doesn’t wanna get picked up is a much more complex activity.
I feel like MMA is where you can be the most successful financially- and fame-wise, right?
Yeah. There's not much money (in wrestling) beyond coaching or running camps. So MMA is kind of the one path for wrestlers to make money. But honestly, it's a pretty dumb way to make money and the UFC is not known for paying its fighters well.
Why are more women joining wrestling?
I don't know, honestly. I haven't thought of that much. The girls I coach, they're all from very different backgrounds and mindsets. It's been my experience as a high school coach that oftentimes girls have a higher tendency to do one sport in high school and that's it. They don't want to do multiple sports. They have their one thing they go in, while boys are more open to playing multiple sports in high school. So now we have another sport open, where it is a girls sport, and we have a fair amount of girls who played a different sport and then had problems or didn't make the team in their sport and come and join the wrestling team and loved it and never wanted to go back. So it could be that girls who want to compete found another sport to compete in. It’s a pretty open field right now. I have to look into it deeper, I have no clue, to be honest, on why women are joining.
I've talked to people who grew up in the 50s and 60s, and they had no opportunities; like it was either cheerleading or nothing. And then friends I know who grew up in the 80s and 90s, you could barely field a team in the area half the time in basketball and softball. But now if you look at those sports, those are huge. It takes like a generation or two, so I guess you're kind of at the pioneering stage.
So it could one of those things, an opportunity where they can find another sport and the same reason why, you know, softball took off when it did, and basketball. I think part of it, in my area, there's a lot of people of Japanese descent and a fair amount of wrestlers who are also judo players, so it could be that we're just getting more crossover because you judo and wrestling have a lot of similarities. I think also the popularity of jujitsu is one of the reasons why. I know a lot of kids are doing jujitsu or have parents to do jujitsu. Torrance is where the Gracie family moved to (the family that started jujitsu) and this is their headquarters. I think part of that, too, is we just get those people who are interested in grappling for one reason or another from jujitsu. There is no high school jujitsu team or club, so they join wrestling.
What do you think these kids get most out of wrestling that they can use going forward that other people maybe miss out on?
There's a famous quote from a Dan Gable, who is one of the all-time greats of wrestling. He had a 399-1 career record in college with a gold medal. He then went on to coach and holds the record for the most NCAA team wins, just that titan of wrestling. He has a quote that's often said: “Once you've wrestled, everything else is easy.”
So a lot of times, the mental fortitude it takes to be a good wrestler makes other aspects of your life easy. I played football. I coached football for a year at the freshman level and you have those kids who joined the football team just to join. You only have 11 kids on the field. It’s a team sport where if one kid screws up, the whole thing could get screwed up. So you have those kids who are great in practice, work really hard, but weigh 98 lbs. sopping wet. And if I put them out there, they can get hurt or mess up the play and stuff like that.
Wrestling has much more of an equality side to it in that, your weight class is your weight class. You either make weight or not make weight, and at any time if you want to challenge to be the number one guy, you have a wrestle off. Whoever wins the match is the number one guy. There's no coach’s interference of, no, I think this guy is a bit better. It's pretty cut and dry of who's the best guy. And you know you can earn that spot, and you have to wrestle that guy every day. So it becomes a sport of, you know your pecking order and it's very clear cut of who’s where and why. And that aspect, along with the really difficult physical parts compared to football, I've been much more tired after 6 minutes wrestling than I've ever been after a football game.
I've been more beat up after a football game; getting hit in the hand with a metal face plate doesn't feel good, but this exertion you spend, it doesn't allow for those kids that screw around to screw around as much. We rarely have discipline problems compared to the football team because there isn't much downtime. When you do have downtime, you want to relax. So there's a higher level of respect among people on the team and a higher level of, hey, we can't screw around, because in the end, it’s you and one other person in a singlet in front of everybody. If you win or lose, there's no one else to blame. So you have to take that personal responsibility for what's going on. You can't hide in the crowd.
Do you think that kids who do play other sports benefit from what they learn in wrestling?
Oh, yeah. I wrestled and played football in high school and my wrestling made my football better. I grew up in a family, my dad played football, my grandfather played in the NFL. My dad coached football. I had a lot of knowledge and I had the genetics to play football. But if it wasn't for wrestling, I would not have been nearly as good as I was. In the regular world, times when I was in the Coast Guard, I was doing boardings up in Alaska, jumping on boats and rope ladders and stuff, and just the body mechanics and natural reactions saved me from pretty serious injuries more than once, just by being able to move around and recognizing what's going on. I got from that wrestling that I would not have gotten from football or baseball or soccer or the other sports I played.
Have you seen kids you coach improve in their other sports?
I played d-line and I was undersized as a nose guard. My senior year I was 220 lbs. at nose guard. But I was all-CIF and all-league. At football practice, as a lineman, you're getting a couple dozen touches of practice on getting reads and stuff like that. In wrestling, you’re getting a couple thousand per practice. You're constantly reading somebody's movement. And a lot of times you're reading it when you’re not looking at them. If you're in the bottom position, you can't see your opponent; you have to feel where they're going and that helps train your awareness that really improves your hands and your hips and stuff like that in football. A lot of our kids in the wrestling program are the top kids in the football program, too.
Were you going to try to wrestle in college before the injuries?
There aren't many offers to wrestle out here. And the team being what it was and me being new to wrestling, I would have done decent my senior year. I would have been league champ. I might have placed at CIF, but nothing that would have gotten interest from an outside college. I got some offers for JC's for football but I didn't have an interest in playing in college.
What are your long-term goals with your coaching career?
The short-term goal is to get to the point where our girls team is big enough to have a decent sized dual meet team. The long-term goal is to bring up our girls team to the point where it's competing for championships with our boys. I want our girls team to be another powerhouse in the area.
So what do you need to do to make that happen?
So the first part’s recruitment; getting the word out there, getting more girls to join. I'm already in touch with the head coach of the junior college team at Cerritos. He’s the head girls coach right now and he is taking over the boys program in a couple of years. He was an NCAA all-American in wrestling. He's done a lot of coaching for international competitors and he's really interested in getting women's wrestling ahead. He just he just did a masters dissertation on women's wrestling in the college level. So I have a conduit with him to tournaments and wrestling clubs where I can send my wrestlers to get more training. I have his knowledge I can tap into for basics and also just for scholarships. The school he's at, even if our wrestlers have no interest in competing beyond the JC level, they get the first two years of their college paid for free and wrestle there.
Do you have a favorite baseball memory, whether you were playing or watching?
My favorite memory would be when my Little League won the pennant for All-Stars. It was the first time ever, the first time in like decades, but I was part of the team that won that Pennant in 2001. I got on the team as an alternate and the coach… I was at every practice, I was working hard, and there was some kids that weren't. And he actually kicked some kids off and put me onto the actual team in recognition of my hard work at practice. So earning my spot that way, and then being part of that championship team, is still something I I look back on fondly.
Is that mostly because of winning or because of how you earned your way on the team?
Both. It’s a not true thing at all times, but you know the American maxim: if you work hard enough, you can earn your spot. In that moment, I did work hard enough and I earned my spot and then I was part of that team that won the championship. It was that reinforcement of, put your nose to the grindstone, show up to practice, be respectful, do what you need to do, and I'm lucky enough to have the genetics and the athletic background to make that work as well.
And then you apply that meritocracy approach to your wrestling teams then now?
Yeah, the Coast Guard was the same way. If you showed yourself willing to work hard and people recognized that, you could get a lot of qualifications and access to things you wouldn’t normally get if you're not at the rank your at. So I got to do and see things most people never got to do just because I worked hard, I didn't brag about it, I just did it. And part of that started with baseball.
One thing I did think of at the end there was I guess one aspect, the physical aspect of baseball that's stayed with me since, has been the hand eye coordination part. Like catching balls, hitting baseballs. I've always read that the hardest thing to do in all sports is to hit a Major League fastball, right? And just having that from a very young age, that kind of training helped a lot and a lot of other things, too, especially sports. Very few sports you'll be able to do, throw and catch and track an object that many times when in baseball. So I'm sure that's paid off in more ways than one.
With all the specialization of kids and sports today, do your wrestlers have more broad sports backgrounds?
We have a lot of kids who are great athletes, like great at working out and good at wrestling. But you hit ‘em a ball and they look like a 2-year-old. You're like how are you this good at this sport and so bad at this? And I think part of it is playing with an object is way different than wrestling with a human. So having that other aspect of that mind-body connection and knowing where my hand's going to go, knowing where my head is, you get a bit more aware of where things going and coming from.
So do you notice that kind of coordination, quickness aspect, they take a little longer to develop if you haven't had that background?
Yeah, definitely. With ball sports, if you’re trying to teach a 13 year old those kinds of things, it takes a long time for them to catch up. And I've had plenty of kids come in who have done no sports at all and decide to do wrestling, it usually it takes them three to four years for them to get to a point where they're athletically inclined. You don't get a kid who's a star who's done nothing at age 13 and goes, I'm going to be a wrestler. Those kids who had the Little League experience or soccer experience, they're going to have a much higher chance of succeeding than a kid who does nothing until they hit 13.