By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

DES MOINES, Iowa, Feb. 19, 2025 — What a rush of fun memories swept over me Wednesday morning when I joined thousands of fans coming and going at Wells Fargo Arena here for first-round matches in the Iowa High School Athletic Association’s 100th boys state wrestling tournament.

It was special for a lot of reasons.

It’s not just that the tournament stands as one of the oldest, biggest and best high school athletic state championships in America.

Session 1 of the Iowa high school boys’ state wrestling tournament, on this Wednesday morning at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. It is sanctioned by the Iowa High School Athletic Association, and it continues through Saturday night. The Iowa high school girls’ state wrestling tournament was held in early February in Coralville, sanctioned by the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union.

It’s also loaded with fascinating history. Sample?

The first IHSAA-sanctioned state tourney in 1926 was won by Marshalltown. The coach of the Bobcats then? A young Adolph Rupp!

If you’re old enough, you remember Rupp as the late-great college basketball coach who led the Kentucky Wildcats to national championships in the 1950s and ’60s. But back in the early 1920s, after a star playing career in basketball at the University of Kansas, he taught and coached two years in little Burr Oak, Kansas, then got a better teaching job in Marshalltown. The basketball coaching position was held by someone else, but the MHS wrestling team needed a “faculty sponsor.” That was young Rupp, even though he knew almost nothing about the sport.

In 2005, when I wrote the history of the IHSAA, I learned that Rupp bought a book about wrestling, learned what he could, and then essentially backed up the leadership of a high school senior who was the star wrestler.

“The story the old timers were all telling me when I came to Marshalltown was that Adolph Rupp was actually more of a chaperone for the wrestling team than the coach,” George Funk told me. Funk coached the Bobcats in basketball from 1963 to 1989. “Marshalltown had a great wrestler on those teams of that era, Allie Morrison, and he supposedly did most of the real coaching.” (Morrison was later an Olympian.)

Checking in for their opening match Wednesday morning at the Iowa high school state wrestling tournament — 106-pounders Kylan Walsh of Cedar Rapids Kennedy and Taitumn Deppe of Xavier Catholic, also in Cedar Rapids. (I’ll introduce Walsh more fully later in this column.)

Another historical nugget? The fourth-place finisher at 145 pounds in the 1932 state tournament was Norman Borlaug, of Cresco. I hope you know that he became the founder of the “Green Revolution,” in which he scientifically increased global food production to keep millions of people from starvation. And for that he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Borlaug also inspired the creation of the World Food Prize, now headquartered in Des Moines. He was a lifelong fan of wrestling, too.

And Waterloo West in the 1960s gave us three-time state champion Dan Gable, who went on to win the Olympic Gold Medal in 1972, then coached the Iowa Hawkeyes to 15 national championships in college wrestling. He’s still generally regarded as the greatest name in the sport’s history.

So many memories!

In 1984, I realized I actually knew very little about wrestling at any level. My own high school, Shenandoah in southwest Iowa, didn’t offer the sport until the early 1970s, and by then I was graduated and gone. By the ’80s, I admitted in one of my Des Moines Register columns that “I’ve never felt quite whole as an Iowan because of one thing: I’m no fan of wrestling despite living in the state that must be the wrestling capital of the world.”

I decided to do something about it. I called Doug Brown and asked for counseling. Brown back then was the music director of WOI-FM public radio, and was also the commentator for Iowa Public Television’s coverage of the high school state wrestling tournament, as well as many of the wrestling matches at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. I asked him why I should like wrestling.

He told me what he liked most about the sport is “the democracy of it — how little guys are just as important as big guys,” and he also praised “the dramatic explosiveness of it.” He went on: “There’s a strong sense of occasion to it that requires tremendous concentration of training, emotion and physical ability into a very brief but very electric period of time.”

I concluded that if somebody as smart and cool as Doug Brown was back then liked wrestling, it must be good. And I’ve loved it ever since!

Cedar Rapids Kennedy coaches Logan Mulnix (left) and head coach Nick Leclere leaning into a match in the state tournament.

I also got to talk, at length over the years, with Dave Harty, who in his 35 years as manager of the state wrestling tournament for the IHSAA, turned it into what was the biggest annual high school athletic events in the nation — with nearly 700 competitors and 100,000 paying fans over its three-day run (now four days).

Why, I asked a whole lot of people, is wrestling so strong in Iowa?

“I think it was the influence of our agricultural heritage, our small communities and the work ethic of our people,” Bob Siddens, who was Dan Gable’s high school coach, told me.

The IHSAA’s Harty added, “The wrestling fan is a different breed, as are the competitors, coaches and officials. I call it ‘blue-collar professional.’ They might tell you where to go, but they’re good people.”

As I looked around the tournament on Wednesday, it seemed as strong as ever.

Couple more reasons it seemed so special to me:

—I heard probably the best version of the National Anthem by a high school singer that I’ve heard since John Moore, now a professional opera singer, graduated from Okoboji High School 25 or so years ago. The anthem on Wednesday was a brilliant a cappella solo by Keokuk High School junior Carter Killoren. I’m telling you, keep your eyes (and ears) on this kid. He’s already an All-State singer. He has great potential.

—For what I believe is the first time in the history of the extended Offenburger family, one of our own qualified for the Iowa high school state wrestling tournament! He is Kylan Walsh, a sophomore who made state as the 106-pounder for Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School. He’s my great-nephew. Yes, he got beat in the first round Wednesday, but making state as a sophomore? Hey, that has us all excited. “Just fyi, his grandmother is Chris Werner,” my sister Chris, also of Cedar Rapids, insisted on adding.

Get after it, boys! That’s Kylan Walsh of Cedar Rapids Kennedy on the left, and Taitumn Deppe of Xavier Catholic in Cedar Rapids on the right. Deppe won this first-rounder.

(Actually, our claiming Kylan as our family’s first state wrestling tourney qualifier depends on how inclusive you want to be about family. Kylan’s stepmother Emily Walsh tells me her uncle Dan Lender qualified for state from Lynnville-Sully High School decades ago. I’ve never met the guy, but we can leave it at this: If he wants to claim us, we’ll claim him, too.)

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.