MONTAGUE — Olympians don’t often venture to the White Lake area, but the Montague wrestling program has been fortunate to host one two years in a row.
Jim Gruenwald, who’s entering his 16th season as head wrestling coach at Division III Wheaton College in Illinois and was a competitor at both the 2000 and 2004 Olympics in Greco-Roman wrestling, was a guest instructor at this week’s Montague wrestling camp, his second straight summer doing so. Gruenwald’s connection to Montague is that he coaches Wildcat alum Cale Coppess for the Thunder.
In addition to leading the Wheaton program, Gruenwald has busy summers working camps like Montague’s - he said he will be in 12 different states over the course of June and July.
While Gruenwald’s most well-known accomplishment is those two times he secured Olympic spots - he finished sixth in Sydney and 10th in Athens, both times in the 60-kilogram (132-pound) weight class - he looks at his coaching opportunities as much more than that. He enjoys the chance to lay a foundation for young kids. (While he’s not allowed by NCAA rule to specifically recruit wrestlers at these camps, he did allow that introducing himself to young wrestlers around the country can have its future benefits as well.)
“Love produces hard work,” Gruenwald said. “I love what I do. I love building kids. I love pointing them in the right direction. We’ve got so many things that are distracting kids today, especially as they get into high school and college. The drugs, the sex, the alcohol, the staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning playing Halo, or Call of Duty, or whatever game it is. Something like wrestling provides guidance and instruction. It gives them an outlet for that aggression that is controlled.”
Gruenwald becoming a coach was a natural fit for him, following in the footsteps of his own college coach, Ben Peterson, a 1972 Olympic champion and ‘76 silver medalist. (Ben’s brother John was a ‘72 silver medalist and ‘76 champion; oddly enough, both brothers’ runner-up spots came at the hands of the same wrestler, Soviet wrestler Levan Tediashvili.) Like Gruenwald after him, Peterson coached at a religious school - Maranatha Baptist in Wisconsin, which Gruenwald attended at the request of his mother despite Division I recruiting attention and found himself loving. Prior to his time at Wheaton, Gruenwald was an assistant Greco-Roman coach at the U.S. Olympic training center in Marquette in the Upper Peninsula.
One standout anecdote Gruenwald shared from his wrestling career was a brief history of his decade-plus long rivalry with two-time Olympian Dennis Hall, a peer of his in high school in Wisconsin who spent years being his chief obstacle to making the Olympic team himself until finally breaking through.
Gruenwald’s accomplishments from those relatively humble beginnings - he also attended a small high school by wrestling standards, Greendale High School - underscores a maxim Montague coach Kris Maddox has long held about the Wildcats’ program, that great things are possible in Montague if you work hard enough.
Certainly Coppess has been an example of that; after becoming the Wildcats’ all-time wins leader with 171, the Wheaton rising junior took sixth place in the Division III regional tournament last year, one of three Thunder wrestlers who placed. He and his family also hosted Gruenwald on his visit this week.
“He’s so teachable and he’s relentless,” Gruenwald said of Coppess. “I love that. Coach Maddox is clearly doing good things here.”
Coppess, who along with a couple of teammates helped out at the three-day camp, said what he appreciates about Gruenwald is how genuine he is.
“He’s just always himself,” Coppess said. “Being vulnerable and open about struggles, or just being goofy and being himself around us, really helps build trust and build that relationship. I trust him as much as I trust my own father, just because he’s himself. He’s a really good, godly man, and somebody that I really look up to.”
Coppess added that he’s found that the work ethic he developed at Montague has led to him feeling he’s outworking his peers in college.
“In college, I notice I’m in the room working out and people are noticing (and asking), ‘Why are you working out so much?’ Or, ‘Why are you going so hard?’” Coppess said. “That’s just something that’s been ingrained in me since day one here.”
The wrestling focus of the camp was ostensibly throws, a key facet of Greco-Roman wrestling, but Maddox said he wisely gave Gruenwald “free rein” over what he would teach.
“He said, ‘Being a college coach, I always see kids who can’t get off the bottom,’” Maddox said. “I said, ‘Run with it. If college kids can’t get off the bottom, then we probably have the same thing.’”
Gruenwald obviously loves wrestling and views it as a problem that so few high school wrestlers go on to compete in college. Whether at Wheaton or not, he wants athletes to go as far as they can in the sport.
“We lose 97% of our high school wrestlers who do not wrestle in college,” Gruenwald said. “I wrote a book about it (Not All Roads Lead to Gold). We’re losing kids, a lot of times, because either coaches are losing their minds, parents are losing their minds, they’re over competing, they’re over cutting weight. Whatever it happens to be, that’s a terrible statistic. I want to show kids there’s a better way. You can be intense and you can have fun and then you can move on to the next level.”
The Montague wrestling summer continues over the next several weeks with a camp led by two-time All-American Jeff Jordan and the Pure Wrestling Beach Series at Pere Marquette in Muskegon, led by Wildcat assistant Andrew Nold. Maddox, though, hopes some of what Gruenwald discussed takes hold.
“He has his books, and you don’t realize all he’s accomplished until you really get into his books,” Maddox said. “When I have somebody come in, I want them to be more than just wrestling here. I want them to get some value out of the camp. We’d love for them to pick up on the wrestling technique, but I want them to pick up on the other stuff outside of that.
“It’s not just about wrestling with him. It’s more about creating young men and women. That’s kind of the values we have here at Montague. We’d like to create good wrestlers and good men and women, but we want to create productive, good students and people in our society that will give back for many years to come.”
