It’s a motto that has kept hundreds if not more than a thousand
kids out of trouble in Gilroy over the years, while making a town
known best for its garlic almost as well known for its punishing
wrestling programs.
It’s a motto that has kept hundreds if not more than a thousand kids out of trouble in Gilroy over the years, while making a town known best for its garlic almost as well known for its punishing wrestling programs.
“We joke, but it’s almost a rite of passage,” Gilroy Hawks wrestling club head coach Greg Varela said. “Everyone in Gilroy has gone to the Garlic Festival and almost everyone in Gilroy has gone through wrestling.”
Founded in the late ’70s by Charlie Morales with the help of the late Oscar Gonzalez, Varela’s grandfather, the Hawks are the bedrock for indisputably Gilroy’s most successful sport. A youth wrestling club that travels to tournaments across the state and country, the Hawks currently teach more than 100 boys and girls as young as four to as old as 18 the fundamentals of the sport while also providing specialized traning techniques. Their season typically runs February through June.
Aside from state and national championships earned at the elementary and middle school levels, five individual state title winners at the high school level have been produced by the Hawks over the years.
Kordell Baker was Gilroy High’s first California state champion in 1987. Former Hawks Martin Gonzalez and Hunter Collins became the second and third state champions from GHS last season. Martin Gonzalez and fellow former Hawk Jesse Delgado became the Gilroy High School Mustangs’ most recent champs at the state meet earlier this month.
Generations of Hawks wrestlers share bloodlines – Oscar Gonzalez was the father of 2008 California State Coach of the Year and GHS wrestling coach Armando Gonzalez, whose son is Martin Gonzalez – but what seems to have made the youth wrestling club so successful over the course of three decades is the feeling of family fostered among everyone by the strict environment.
“I just finished my seventh year here (coaching the Hawks) and I was really shocked (in the beginning) how close the family really is,” said Varela, 29, who was a Hawk himself at age 5. “One parent is treating another child like it’s their own. It’s implied that if [kids] get out of line, you scold them like they’re your own.”
Baker, now a family man and a firefighter with Santa Clara County, recalls times when he was a Hawk and had no way of getting to a tournament. But there was always a helping hand, he said.
“There were a few times when my mother’s car broke down and we were all caravaning and I just hopped in someone else’s car,” Baker said. “It was a big group – caravans traveling all over the country for big tournaments besides all over the state.”
The wrestlers don’t just get support – whether it be financially or in time to attend tournaments – from their parents. Baker said his fellow Hawks were an integral part of his individual success.
“The support of teammates that might not have been able to continue (deep) into tournaments – they were all my practice partners,” he said. “And if you don’t have practice partners you wont get far at any level.”
Thriving off of competition within the club while training in facilities that have been far from pristine has built a toughness amongst the Hawks – a pay your dues attitude that doesn’t make allowances for excuses. The GHS wrestling program has trained in a cramped converted portable classroom for the better part of a decade. This season at state the team took sixth after finishing a school-best second last year and fourth in 2006. If anything, the conditions have made kids that started grappling as Hawks in grade school become closer once they get into high school.
But to continue climbing the ladder to reach the next level, things must improve. A new training facility built at South Valley Middle School in December has many in Gilroy’s wrestling community thinking the Mustangs’ latest results are just a sign of things to come, even with talent eventually being split between GHS and Christopher High School, set to open this fall.
Armando Garcia, the head wrestling coach at South Valley Middle School, recently finished building a wrestling room at the middle school with a chorus line of contributors. The facility is being viewed by many as the closest thing Gilroy will see to a state of the art facility. Other schools’ programs also have been training in the room, developing an even deeper culture of camaraderie.
“That was the whole focus (of building the room),” Garcia said, “looking at the investment we’re doing for the future. I’m a young coach and we have a facility now that will be with me for the next 20 years. It will help support the high school guys and we had amazing success with the bare minimum facility. Now we can just take it to a whole other level.”
Giving youngsters a more inviting atmosphere to train in, combined with prospects of rewarding, attainable goals as long as they’re willing to work hard can go a long way in helping future generations avoid the pitfalls that come with idle time and trivial if not dangerous pursuits, such as drugs and gangs.
“What the Hawks have built is an atmosphere,” Varela said. “There are so many parents and kids involved, [the wrestlers] know they’re doing something different from other people, but they’re not different from their friends. They don’t even know they’re staying out of trouble or staying active. It’s their lifestyle.”
