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Craig Mattick:
Welcome to another edition of In Play. I'm Craig Mattick. Today's guest, a long time educator. He was a long time football and wrestling coach. Mix in some coaching of track and field early in his career, but it was 39 years at Parkston. And in 2009, he did some great research on the beginning of high school wrestling in South Dakota. There was a big pushback of establishing high school wrestling in South Dakota, but today it's a great sport and an expanding sport in South Dakota. Our guest today, John Gilman of Parkston. John, welcome to In Play.
John Gilman:
Thank you.
Craig Mattick:
You chronicled how wrestling got started in the state. It's very interesting. It's very amazing. I really enjoyed reading about it, and we'll get to that research here in just a moment. But John, you got to go back to Hudson, South Dakota. That was your first coaching job. What was that coaching job?
John Gilman:
I was an assistant football. I helped out with the football squad. That's about all. I didn't do a lot. That's where I went to high school.
Craig Mattick:
Now, were you from the Hudson area or Beresford?
John Gilman:
Yeah, I was from Hudson.
Craig Mattick:
Well, how was that, going right to your alma mater right away?
John Gilman:
Well, I think I was still in college when I did it. I drove back and forth.
Craig Mattick:
But then you were there for just one year and then Parkston called. What was happening at that time?
John Gilman:
It was a strange deal. That week, I was applying for jobs then when there was a million teachers applying for jobs out there. You'd get a letter saying, "Thank you for your letter. We already have this job filled." One week I applied in Egan, Wolsey, and Parkston. I never heard anything Egan and Wolsey, and I got a letter from Parkston, "Please come for the interview." I go, "Whoa." And it said coaching. It didn't say head football. It just said coaching. Well, we're all of 24 year olds at the time, and I don't know if I would've applied if I'd have known that. But I got the job and I got thrown in the wrestling room.
It was kind of funny. We had a new principal. He came to me. I was in the first day in school there. He said, "New football coach, aren't you?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Say, we got a problem here." He says, "Our wrestling coach just resigned. Would you take the wrestling job?" And I said, "Well, Jerry, it might be a problem. I've never seen a wrestling match." He said, "Oh, okay." Well, we found a good man. Mike Heisinger was the wrestling coach, and he's been a friend ever since.
Craig Mattick:
You were an assistant wrestling coach. Were you also the assistant football coach?
John Gilman:
No, I was head football.
Craig Mattick:
Head football. Okay.
John Gilman:
Yeah.
Craig Mattick:
Well, Parkston had some pretty good success in football, at least getting to the state championship game a few times.
John Gilman:
Yeah. I had some pretty good years. I was head coach for six years, but I had about four good years, so it was good. If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have been a hell of a lot better coach.
Craig Mattick:
Well, the one championship though, that was St. Thomas More back in 2014.
John Gilman:
Yeah. I was an assistant then.
Craig Mattick:
But it was great to get that championship after being a runner up three times earlier.
John Gilman:
Yes. That was just super. The Wreath, Riley Wreath made a catch in front of me that I don't believe I ever, ever, ever thought anybody could catch. He reached up length as far as he could reach with one hand and grabbed the ball. It was an outstanding catch. Because otherwise we were beat in the semifinals before that. Anyway, yeah, it's been great. The last couple of years have been great with it's nine man football.
Craig Mattick:
Yes. It was 2022. They get to the finals. Parkston though, lost to Wall. Wall had a pretty good team that year. And it was what, 34-14 Wall in that 9AA championship. When it came to wrestling, how many different head coaches did you work with?
John Gilman:
I worked with 10 different men during my years. I think I was active in school 37 years and then 13 years as a volunteer. I love all the guys.
Craig Mattick:
Well, was there ever a time you thought that you wanted to do the top job in wrestling?
John Gilman:
No, I never wanted to be there. No, I never want... I was very happy where I was. Very happy as assistant.
Craig Mattick:
For a guy who never, ever saw a wrestling match before 1973, it appears that you grew to really love the sport. How did you get hooked with wrestling?
John Gilman:
I don't know. I really, really, really enjoyed it. I found out what a great sport it was and I learned from a lot of the coaches and I just lived and died with the kids and I still do.
Craig Mattick:
It's really tough to win team titles in wrestling. But boy, Parkston has been a state champion in wrestling four times, runner up six times.
John Gilman:
A couple of those runner up times with one or two more wins, we would've won the tournament. I know one year we lost one match, two to one to a Canton kid, and if we'd have won that match, we'd have won the tournament. But we won a lot of them. But we've been close a few times too.
Craig Mattick:
Yeah, some of those runner ups back in the seventies, lost to Faulkton. The eighties, lost to Freeman. The nineties, Bonham, and then of course in the 2000's Webster a couple of times just getting by Parkston.
John Gilman:
Yep. Awful big matches of those people.
Craig Mattick:
What was it like in the wrestling room when you knew you had a really good team put together?
John Gilman:
I just had good kids. Our wrestlers, sometimes they would just almost beat themselves bloody, they'd work so all dang hard. We've had a great tradition and a great attitude in the wrestling room all the time. We just never had any slouches in there. They've always went to go and go and go and go and go.
Craig Mattick:
When did the separation of football and wrestling occur for you? You were a football coach, a head football coach, and then an assistant coach. When did you stop being a head coach?
John Gilman:
About six years. I was an assistant after that.
Craig Mattick:
Well, juggling everything else, plus being a teacher. You were what, a PhyEd teacher if I recall?
John Gilman:
Social studies.
Craig Mattick:
Sure.
John Gilman:
Yeah. More social studies than anything.
Craig Mattick:
Sure. By the way, that very first year of getting paid to be a teacher and coach, that was track and field, right? Was that track and field at Hudson back then?
John Gilman:
I helped out a little bit, not very much.
Craig Mattick:
Well, you got your hands in a lot of sports there, John, with track and field.
John Gilman:
I've been into a lot of stuff.
Craig Mattick:
By the way, Parkston had two team dual titles back in 2003.
John Gilman:
The last two teams, before they stopped it. We were tough, we up and down the line, we were tough. We didn't have many weaknesses at all.
Craig Mattick:
Well, it was gone for a while, but now it's been back for a while. I hope that the team duals the interest that continues to grow for that.
John Gilman:
Yeah, we'll just see what happens.
Craig Mattick:
Well, there was a time, and this happened, and you did this for 18 years. You were the guy promoting the state of wrestling in South Dakota. It was called the Gilman Newsletter. How did you come about becoming-
John Gilman:
It was funny. Kenny Rummel from Howard, one day when he returned, he said, "Gilman, we should start writing a little article once in a while. Let everybody know what's going on in the state?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I guess I could try it, Kenny." I started it and then I started subscribing to all the newspapers in the state, the major papers. So I get results. A lot of people didn't get results anywhere and it took off from there. Well, I got phone calls after that a lot. They say, "How good are these guys?" Or, "How good are these guys?" It just expanded. I had my people on study hall put the papers together, my newsletter. That worked out good. But the newsletter was great for a while, again until technology took over.
Craig Mattick:
How many pages was the newsletter?
John Gilman:
Probably about 10 pages of ads and 10 pages of information, usually about 20 pages.
Craig Mattick:
Oh, you had to sell ads too, huh?
John Gilman:
Yeah.
Craig Mattick:
Wow.
John Gilman:
Yeah, I had a lot of good subscribers, a lot a good advertisers.
Craig Mattick:
Did that get you ready for chronicling and or researching the history of South Dakota? You were kind of a reporter, an editor at that time with your newsletter.
John Gilman:
I don't even know why I did it at the time. It's been a long time. I don't know why. I don't think anybody asked me to do it, I just thought to myself, what the hell? We'll do it. We'll go back and go through and see where we can find on some of this stuff. In the old days, it was tough to find stuff on wrestling.
Craig Mattick:
Well, the high school wrestling was sanctioned by the South Dakota High School Activities Association back in 1960. It's been going strong since, but John, it was 1953. You got to go back to '53. Who established the first wrestling program in the state?
John Gilman:
I think Spearfish was one of the earlier programs and Rapid City was starting at about the same time. Wrestling didn't really start getting going, I don't think, until around 1966 or so. When I was a senior, I know in high school, I think Beresford had it and I think Hayward had it, but it was just slowly starting to develop. A lot of football coaches wanted their kids to wrestle as they would make them better football players.
Craig Mattick:
1953, does the name Walter Hack come to mind?
John Gilman:
Yeah. Wasn't he one of the ones to try to start programs?
Craig Mattick:
He was the superintendent at the South Dakota School for the Blind. They established the first wrestling program in the state, but according to your report, a lot of residents didn't want anything to do with wrestling. What do you suppose that was that way?
John Gilman:
They didn't want to interfere with their other programs. I'm sure the basketball coaches didn't want it at all because they would take kids away from the basketball programs. That was a lot of it. They didn't want to lose their people from the programs they had.
Craig Mattick:
Well, Warren Williamson was a graduate of SDSU and this would've been a year later or so, 1956. It sounded like he became a big promoter of the sport of wrestling.
John Gilman:
Yep, he did. He was a big promoter of it. He sure was. He tried to set up how the scoring and everything else like that. He was a great promoter of it.
Craig Mattick:
I had heard he was demonstrating the sport at assemblies at PTA meetings, at service clubs all across of the state.
John Gilman:
Yep.
Craig Mattick:
Just try to sell it.
John Gilman:
That was pushing. I think that's what made a lot of schools decide they wanted to start wrestling.
Craig Mattick:
Rapid City Central, I think was one of the first high schools that did start.
John Gilman:
I think that's a mistake too. It wasn't Rapid City Central. It was just Rapid City then.
Craig Mattick:
That's correct. There was no Central, it was just Rapid City.
John Gilman:
That's a mistake I had in there. I had Rapid City Central, but Central didn't become until Stevens came along, so it was just a Rapid City school in those days. They were an early starter and like I said, Spearfish was in there too. Spearfish was an early starter. It's interesting too, before it was sanctioned in 1959, Smokey Wallman was the sixth grader and he won. They had a tournament unsanctioned and he was a state champion as a sixth grader.
Craig Mattick:
And we certainly know where the Wallman name has gone in history of wrestling in the state.
John Gilman:
Unfortunately, they were in our district and region every year, so we had to wrestle a Wallman every year.
Craig Mattick:
Let's see. 1957, Redfield started wrestling.
John Gilman:
Redfield started.
Craig Mattick:
Yeah, and a famous name Ken Greeno. He was the athletic director. Ken, it sounded like, was a huge promoter of wrestling.
John Gilman:
Yeah. A lot of those guys in that time period, they pushed it. They were trying to push it anyway.
Craig Mattick:
Kenny did eventually go to the Activities Association and say, "Hey, let's sanction this," and eventually they did in 1960. But prior to that, this is where it gets really interesting. The quality of the sport of 1958, it was the first state wrestling tournament. Now it wasn't sanctioned, but it was the first state wrestling tournament had about what, 50 wrestlers in that state tournament.
John Gilman:
Right.
Craig Mattick:
I heard that the wrestlers wore all sorts of different clothing for a wrestler.
John Gilman:
I think they had straw mats. I think it wasn't very advanced. I know that.
Craig Mattick:
Yeah. I heard the surplus government mattresses-
John Gilman:
Yeah, think about that.
Craig Mattick:
... for wrestling.
But what were the wrestlers wearing? What were their uniforms?
John Gilman:
Oh, just any kind of a singlet they could put on. A lot of them didn't have a team jersey, so a T-shirt and a shirt or sweatshirt or whatever. Whatever they could find, they wore.
Craig Mattick:
Roger Danker was at Spearfish, and he is quoted as saying that Rapid looked so good. Their wrestlers looked so good, but all that spearfish had, they wore long underwear and dyed them red.
John Gilman:
Yeah. That was something. I know some schools did that too.
Craig Mattick:
It's crazy. The beginnings of the sport and seeing how it has evolved and how good the sport has become today.
John Gilman:
The biggest changes I think, when I first started in Parkston, we would wrestle and a lot of times we would've an A, a varsity match, a B team and a C team. There was no such thing as a double dual or a triangle or anything like that. I think if you had 20 matches in a year, you had a lot of matches. That was a lot of wrestling. Today, kids wrestle 65 matches, 70 matches. It's just changed like that.
Craig Mattick:
John, let's talk about some of the rules of wrestling in South Dakota back in the late fifties. My understanding is that choke holds and illegal holds were very common in high school wrestling.
John Gilman:
Oh, yeah. They let a lot of things go in the early days of it. You take care of the kids a lot better today than we did in the early days of wrestling.
Craig Mattick:
I want to talk about a couple of rules that used to be. In the state tournament, a wrestler would be eliminated if his first round opponent lost in the second round. How did that rule ever come about?
John Gilman:
I have no idea how it came about, but it took a lot of good kids. If a good kid got upset one time, he was done. We got rid of it finally. But that was in for a long, long time. You get beat the first round and the guy that beat you, you were done.
Craig Mattick:
Wow. By the way, it ended in 1979. It hasn't been that long.
John Gilman:
Yeah, it was in it for a long time
Craig Mattick:
And riding time. A wrestler riding his opponent for a minute was awarded a point.
John Gilman:
Riding time stopped the year I came to Parkston. I still remember the clock. Yeah, riding time stopped in 1972.
Craig Mattick:
Why did it, was it just tough to enforce?
John Gilman:
I think so. I just think it was finding people to make sure that they could take care of the clock and things like that. I think that was what part of the deal.
Craig Mattick:
Well, if you can help us remember, 1969, a major blizzard hit Eastern South Dakota and caused a huge controversy at the state wrestling tournament. Do you remember that?
John Gilman:
Oh my God. They didn't wait. There was about three teams, one of the Sioux Falls schools who was favored to win it, it was the Sioux Falls, Washington maybe. They didn't make it because of the blizzard. Today weather warnings and stuff, people know what's going on. I don't think that'd ever happen again. I don't think they'd ever start a tournament unless they had everybody there. If they couldn't get everybody there, I think they'd postpone it.
Craig Mattick:
Yeah. The tournament officials chose not to delay the tournament and those teams that couldn't get there, they were out of luck, weren't they?
John Gilman:
That's right. They were just out of luck.
Craig Mattick:
Now today, normally with the weather, we know a few days ahead of time that, it happens with basketball too, if they know that on Wednesday there's going to be a blizzard, they get all the athletes and the officials to the site so that everybody is there and ready to go. Do you think the 1970s may have been the biggest expansion of wrestling in South Dakota?
John Gilman:
That's when you could have A, B and a C team. You had a lot of wrestling, so a lot of kids out for wrestling. But then eventually we decided to go to 13 wrestlers. Then we decided to go to 14 wrestlers. Well, the big schools, they could handle that, but the smaller schools might be having trouble filling 12 weights, now they had to fill 14 weights. There was a big difference there.
Craig Mattick:
You chronicled some of the greatest wrestlers ever in South Dakota high school wrestling. There are so many, but how about you yourself? Can you give me some of those wrestlers, even some that you saw that really stood out in the history of high school wrestling?
John Gilman:
Well, the Wallman Boys by far. Three Wallman boys were outstanding. They're the ones, I think if I thought of anybody, those would be the guys who I would think of. There's just been so many great kids. It's hard to believe. We had Scott Mechtenberg here who was an outstanding young wrestler. Lincoln Starley, talking about people like that. Funny story about Lincoln Starley. I was one of the coaches on the Disney duels and Lincoln Starley was one of our wrestlers. The first match, I think we had to go against the Michigan team and Starley went out there and went bam, pin the kid. I thought, well, this ain't going to be too bad. We won two more matches after that. We had Riley Wreath and Kosher from Wagner, the three wins, otherwise we got pinned or technical in every match.
Craig Mattick:
And we thought we had a pretty good team. Well, we did have a pretty good team that was put together. What did Randy Lewis do for high school wrestling in South Dakota?
John Gilman:
Randy Lewis was outstanding. We didn't see him much because they were A, but he was just an outstanding wrestler.
Craig Mattick:
And of course went on to the '84 Olympics. Great, great wrestler.
John Gilman:
We had the Shears.
Craig Mattick:
The Shears, yes.
John Gilman:
The Shear boys. They were outstanding wrestlers also.
Craig Mattick:
South Dakota has seen another expansion of the sport today, the adding of girls to wrestling. What do you think it's done? How do you see that progressing in South Dakota?
John Gilman:
Well, I think it's going to grow a lot. We don't have it here in Parkston yet, but it's going to grow.
Craig Mattick:
You're in the South Dakota Wrestling Coaches Hall of Fame. What does that mean to you, John?
John Gilman:
Just means, if you told me 25 years ago when I graduated high school, that I was going to be the wrestling Coach's Hall of Fame, I'd ask you what you've been smoking or drinking that day.
Craig Mattick:
What a great story about a guy who never saw a wrestling match and spends decades being a part of the sport, writing about the sport, and then chronicling the history of wrestling in South Dakota. It's a great story, John.
John Gilman:
Well, I got into it. I really got into it deep.
Craig Mattick:
John, what are you most proud of your career when it comes to coaching? Specifically wrestling, but also football? You were involved with that, but what are you most proud of?
John Gilman:
I've been proud of being part of the whole athletic program in Parkston. It's been so good. It's been so strong. It's been a good football program. It's been a great wrestling program. I've just been proud to wear Parkston stuff. Proud to wear Parkston wrestling shirt and football the same way. Very, very proud of the whole thing.
Craig Mattick:
Is there anything new you'd like to see happen with wrestling in high school wrestling in the state?
John Gilman:
I still think they're going to drop a few weights, I think they're going to get down maybe back down to 12 weights eventually, because the small schools just can't fill all 14 weight classes. That's one thing that's going to change.
Craig Mattick:
Thanks to John Gilman of Parkston for being our guest today on In Play. Almost four decades at Parkston, educator, football coach and assistant wrestling coach. A story of a man who was asked to be a wrestling coach at Parkston, even though he never had seen a wrestling match.
Of course, a few years later, he'd be the voice of wrestling in South Dakota, producing a 10-page newsletter on the news of wrestling in the state. His chronicling on the history of wrestling in the state a great read. From the fifties when uniforms were swimsuits and long underwear dyed red, and the rules, including choke holds, to today. And listing all of the great wrestlers who have come from the state. Thanks, John, for your dedication to the high school athletes.
In Play with Craig Mattick is made possible by Horton Ian Britton, where smiling at work happens all the time. Apply now at hortonww.com. If you like what you're hearing, please give us a five star review wherever you get your podcast. It helps us gain new listeners. This has been In Play with me, Craig Mattick. This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
