Iola High’s wrestling season kicks off with a flourish this week.
The Mustang grapplers will be at Erie on Tuesday for a preseason mixer, before the junior varsity and girls wrestlers will get another round of exhibition matches on Wednesday at Santa Fe Trail.
From there, the season officially opens Friday for some JV and girls at Caney before the varsity squad goes to Caney for a tournament Saturday.
“We’re starting fast this year,” new head coach John Taylor said. “This will give us a guide of where we are, and where we’ll need to work.”
Taylor is “new” in name only, having served both as an assistant wrestling coach at IHS, and as the head coach for the past 15 years for the Iola Kids Wrestling Club, where he coached most of this year’s Mustangs when they were in elementary and middle school.
“Some of these kids I’ve worked with for a long time,” Taylor said. “We have a really young group this year, and I’m OK with that. It shows the future is bright.”
Taylor’s coaching career dates back to 1995, after his own wrestling career concluded. He worked with school-aged grapplers, then coached a couple of years in college.
About the only time he didn’t coach wrestling was when his son TJ was born.
“I took a six-year hiatus, and then when he was old enough, I got back into it,” Taylor noted.
TJ Taylor, who now plays baseball at Southwestern College in Winfield, grew up to become a state-qualifying and league champion wrestler at Iola under the tutelage of his father and former Iola wrestling coach Jason Bates.
The elder Taylor will continue to oversee the Iola Kids Wrestling Club, and he’s also head coach for the Iola Middle School girls, whose season runs through mid-December.
With his irons in so many fires, Taylor has handed off some of the day-to-day Wrestling Club activities to “a number of other coaches who I trust,” he said. “I’ll still stop by one or two days a week to keep them on the path for middle school and high school.”
WRESTLING, Taylor explained, is an ideal way to keep youngsters engaged, as they develop skills that benefit them in other sports.
“I just love wrestling,” Taylor said. “I’ve been around it my whole life lie. It’s part of who I am.”
Low numbers in recent years, particularly in the high school ranks, had bothered Taylor, but participation has rebounded, both within the wrestling club, and into middle school.
