Joe Wyant knows the storied history of Suburban Lakes League wrestling as well as anyone.

Wyant was an assistant coach under Bob Young for 20 years at Lakota before he replaced Young as the Raiders' head coach beginning with the 1995-96 season. Wyant was Lakota's coach through 2001-02, and he's been on the Eastwood staff ever since.

Wyant replaced Ralph Cubberly as Eastwood's head coach last season and led the Eagles to a second-place finish behind defending champion Elmwood at the 2010 SLL tournament.

“Elmwood has always been really solid, even back in the 1970s,” Wyant recalled. “Eastwood has taken off since about 2000. I've been here for eight or nine years now at Eastwood and I got fortunate to get into two good programs with two good head coaches.”

The SLL, which is dissolving following the 2010-11 school year, began wrestling in 1972-73. Six of the SLL's seven current members are leaving the league to join the newly-formed Northern Buckeye Conference beginning in 2011-12.

Long time Eastwood coach and alumnus Ralph Cubberly (both hands outstretched) and long time Lakota coach Joe Wyant (pointing left) when both worked together at Eastwood. (Press photo by Lee Welch/www.FamilyPhoto Group.com

The NBC will consist of Eastwood, Elmwood, Genoa, Lake, Otsego, Woodmore, Fostoria and Rossford. Current SLL member Gibsonburg is joining the Toledo Area Athletic Conference next year.

“I'm disappointed the league is dissolving,” Wyant said. “It's been a good league and a competitive league. There were good individual (wrestlers) all the way through. If you could win our league, you would probably be a state qualifier. The first 25 years I coached, if you could be a league champion, you would be a state qualifier at least 90 percent of the time.”

The SLL will hold its 39th and final league wrestling tournament next month at Otsego High School. Elmwood, which has won nine league championships including a streak of five straight titles from 1998-2002, is vying for its third straight SLL title this season.

Cubberly's Eagles start from scratch
Cubberly, who is now the head wrestling coach at Defiance High School, built a dynasty at Eastwood beginning in 2004. The Eagles won their first SLL title that year and then won the next four league championships. Eastwood finished second to Elmwood in 2009, Cubberly's final season, and also took second in 1978, '81, '82 and 2003.

When Cubberly, a former Marine, took over at Eastwood the school's wrestling program was on life support. Cubberly first applied for the head coaching position in 1988, after he got out of the Marine Corps.

“There were four kids on the high school team and they were on the verge of cutting the sport,” Cubberly said. “The athletic director (Bill Workman) called me and said, 'If you don't take this job, we're cutting the sport. There's just no interest in this school.' I said, 'I'll take this job and do my best.' ”

Eastwood's SLL dominance began with the 2003-04 team, which earned the school's first SLL wrestling title. The school subsequently hung a banner in the team's honor.

“That was definitely one of my goals when I took over the program,” Cubberly said of the banner. “It took me a while and we finally got it, and then we got a little more than that.”

The Eagles won all five SLL championships from 2004-08 and took second in 2009. Cubberly's decision to leave the program was purely financial — Eastwood was unable to offer him a teaching position — but his coaching legacy is secure.

“My plan was to get as many kids as I could, get them to buy into the program and get a youth program going,” Cubberly said. “It worked – it worked really good, actually. I always tell people I remember a time when Eastwood couldn't get 13th at the Eastwood Invitational, and now we're ranked 13th in the country (2005-06).”

During Cubberly's tenure the Eagles crowned 75 league champions and had 58 state qualifiers, including 29 state placers. Cubberly coached four state champions and five runners-up; his son, Eric, was a two-time state champion and a four-time state qualifier, and his other son, Ryan, was a four-time state qualifier and a two-time state runner-up.

Cubberly said the Eagles never would have had the level of success they enjoyed if it wasn't for the competition they faced year in and year out in the SLL.

“The SLL has great coaches,” he said. “Coach (Richard) Wagner at Genoa, he always had tough teams. You always had to deal with them. The other coach you had to deal with was Dave Lee from Elmwood. Those two programs were going to bring some tough customers to the program.

“I had a lot of respect for (Lakota's) Bob Young. He taught me a lot about coaching wrestling. He would pull me off to the side during a match and tell me what I should be doing. He came in and showed my kids some things. That's one of the reasons I hired Joe Wyant. I knew he worked for Bob all those years and I wanted him on my staff.”

Oak Harbor's dynasty
Speaking of wrestling dynasties, Oak Harbor was the team to beat in the SLL beginning with the league's inaugural season in 1972-73 until the Rockets jumped to the Sandusky Bay Conference following the 1985-86 season.

Oak Harbor took second behind Lakota in 1973 and then went on a streak that saw the Rockets claim 11 SLL titles in the next 13 years.

“Lakota was good,” Wyant said, “and then Oak Harbor just dominated.”

Northwood replaced Oak Harbor as the SLL's eighth member in 1986-87, after the Lakeshore Conference folded in the winter of 1985. Oak Harbor has since won eight SBC titles – including the last four – since 1986-87.

Lakota set the pace in the SLL after the Rockets left for the SBC, capturing all six league titles from 1987-92.

Hector Gonzalez was Oak Harbor's head coach from 1977-78 through 1982-83 and guided the Rockets to five SLL titles. His 1981 team took second place at the Class AA state tournament, behind Medina Highland.

Gonzalez coached a pair of two-time state champions in Carlos Mincheff (1980, '81) and Rob Huston (1981, '82) and had 14 state placers, including two three-time state placers Phil Weirich and Doug Blay. Gonzalez's other state placers included John Biggert, Mike Carman, John Ishmael, Ben Mincheff and Dan Blay.

“I was fortunate when I got there because of the tradition Oak Harbor had before,” said Gonzalez, who now lives in Mentor, Ohio. “We had good athletes — a freshman, sophomore and junior class that were really good. My first year, our freshman class had some excellent wrestlers.

“We had several families that had tradition and were into wrestling, like the Biggerts and the Blays and the Mincheffs. We had several families that had older brothers and it just seemed that freshman class had quite a few brothers that had wrestled. We just had the athletes and they were hard workers and they had been to camps and they wrestled during the summer. That's when summer wrestling started to pick up.”

Gonzalez credited the SLL for providing tough competition, but he also said some of the Rockets' toughest matches often came in the Oak Harbor wrestling room.

“We had some good competition from SLL schools,” Gonzalez said. “They all had several good individuals, but we were fortunate to have several talented individuals and we had good competition within our own wrestling room. We had some tough wrestle-offs just to make it to our varsity lineup. We had some good depth that really helped us.”

Gonzalez left Oak Harbor to become an assistant wrestling coach at Mentor High School, from 1983-84 to 1998-99. After coaching, he stayed active as an assistant athletic director and Spanish teacher, and he served as tournament manager for the Mentor wrestling tournament.

Gonzalez still has fond memories of his years coaching in the SLL.

“Genoa was always a rival and Eastwood had some good teams,” he said. “Lakota, Eastwood, Elmwood, the top four or five schools were very competitive then and they had some excellent coaches who had been there for a while. The league had some good coaches, and that made it so competitive.”

Comets break through
Genoa was a four-time SLL tournament runner-up when Richard Wagner took over the program beginning with the 1989-90 season.

Wagner had already coached for a couple of seasons at Eastwood in the mid-1980s, and he had two state champions as the head coach at Fostoria.

It took time for Wagner, a 1972 Woodmore graduate, to get Genoa in contention for an SLL title, but when the Comets hit their stride, they were very competitive.

The Comets took second behind Elmwood in 1998 and '99 and were second again behind the Royals in 2002. Genoa finally broke through in 2003, winning its first SLL championship behind standouts Josh Resendez, Dan Escobar, Bob Bergman, Ryan Keaton, Eric Mason and Mike Widmer.

“It was a pretty good team,” Wagner said. “We were aware that we had never won (an SLL title). That was the highlight of the season, winning the league. I don't know if I can say what our best team was, but we had a lot of good wrestlers.”

Wagner, who coached at Genoa through the 2008-09 season, had 36 league champions, two state champions in Nick Purdue (twice) and Tony Lopez and 38 state qualifiers. Wagner's son, Doug, was a state qualifier at 152 pounds in 2009.

“You had to wrestle the best you could if you wanted to do well in the league,” Wagner said. “If you're striving to win a league championship as an individual, you knew you had a good chance to be a state qualifier. The SLL helped us prepare for state. If you did well in the league, you knew you would do well at the sectional and district and have a chance to do well at state.”

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