Wrestling coach reaches 37 years on the job
By Jeff Stell, Staff Writer
ROLAND – In 1969, Roland-Story High School wanted to start a wrestling program. So the school hired UNI graduate in Jim Kinyon to get the ball rolling.
Fast forward 37 years and Kinyon is still at Roland-Story and has built a solid program and has a new wrestling room coming next season.
Kinyon, who has been assisted by Rod Bohner for more than 30 years, has seen plenty of changes in the sport during his tenure and more to come with the state wrestling tournament changing venues after a long, historic run at Veterans Auditorium.
Kinyon teaches seventh- and eighth-grade math at Roland-Story Middle School and is also the junior high athletic director and football and boys track coach.
Kinyon sat down with The Tribune to talk about wrestling, volunteering his voice to the Roland-Kiwanis Invitational Softball Tournament every summer and how it is to coach the mayor of the town he lives in.
Tribune: You’ve been coaching wrestling 37 years. How has the sport changed during that time?
Kinyon: It’s different a couple of ways. Some kids have had a lot of coaching by the time they get to high school, and we’re also still getting beginners, so we have a greater range in the room than we did years ago. Now if you have kids cutting five to seven pounds, that’s a fairly good cut where it used to be kids would be cutting 15 to 20 pounds. As a sport, we’re much better off with weight-cutting issues than we were before.
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