Year after year, the best of the best take the mat at Blair Academy
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
Adam Hogue walked to the center of the mat with the weight of a seven-year winning streak on his shoulders.
A hostile, overflow crowd of 2,500 had packed the gym at St. Edward High School of Lakewood outside of Cleveland for the showdown with Blair Academy. It was No. 1 against No. 2. “GON-SOR, GON-SOR, GON-SOR, “the throng chanted as Hogue, a 15-year-old sophomore at Blair, readied himself for the final match of the meet against Dan Gonsor in the 152-pound weight class.
A moment like this was the reason Hogue came to Blair, a high school of roughly 450 students tucked into a gray-brown hillside in Blairstown. His coach had urged him to cherish it. He did.
“The place was going nuts, “Hogue said before practice last week. “I thought I was going to win.
Everyone did — at least everyone associated with Blair.
For a quarter of a century, no school has dominated a sport the way Blair has dominated high school wrestling. Blair’s wrestlers are what Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton were to college basketball during John Wooden’s years at UCLA — a true dynasty.
Last week Blair won yet another state prep championship, taking nine of the 14 weight classes, five of them with pins. The team won 45-straight tournaments before coming in second at a tournament in December. As Hogue faced Gonsor in the Lakewood, Ohio, gym that night, Blair hadn’t lost a dual meet since February 2000, and had held the nation’s top ranking ever since.
It’s a cult-like program that mixes old school and new age. A typical practice begins with shoulder-roles as Eminem blasts on the speakers. Then the wrestlers do cartwheels and round-offs and mix in some yoga for extra flexibility.
“You want to wrestle with the good guys, this is where you come, “said Zack Rey, a standout heavyweight at Hopatcong High School, who showed up in Blair’s wrestling room last week to prepare for his state championship matches.
Today, Blair heads to Lehigh University in search of its 27th consecutive national prep championship.
Blair, like a lot of private schools with top athletic programs, such as St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, is not a member of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association and thus will not compete in the state wrestling championships this weekend. By not being a member of the NJSIAA, Blair is allowed to create its own schedule and attract students from across the country.
Wayne Katan, an assistant coach and former All-American at Syracuse, said there is a simple reason for the success at Blair, where the wrestling program dates to 1917.
“They work harder and they work smarter, and they do it three times a day, 11 months a year, “Katan said.
ONE LONG STREAK ENDS
Yet, on Feb. 3, the streak was on the line.
Blair was up by just a point when Hogue and St. Edward’s Gonsor took the mat. With two minutes to go, Gonsor was up 5-0. Hogue scored two, two-point takedowns, but then Gonsor tried to run out the clock by refusing to get off the mat. Frustrated, Hogue slammed Gonsor’s head against the mat three times. Gonsor’s father sprinted from the stands, nearly starting a riot in the gym.
When the match resumed, Hogue tried a tried a desperation throw, but ended up on the mat as the seconds ticked away. The streak every Blair wrestler has tried desperately to maintain the past seven years was over.
“I guess we’ll be remembered as the seniors who lost it for Blair, “said Jared Platt, a hulking wrestler from Randolph who blames himself because he failed to pin his opponent at 215-pounds. “I hope not.”
Now the team is trying to put the loss in the past and regain its focus for the national prep meet, which includes about 150 private schools from across the country. (St. Edwards will not wrestle at the national meet.) Perhaps more that any other event, it represents Blair’s chance to show how far ahead of the competition it is because every school there can try to attract top wrestlers the way Blair does. And yet, Blair has not lost since Jimmy Carter was president.
“There really is no other place like Blair, “said Vinnie Russo, one of the state’s top referees. “Winning breeds winning, success breeds success, and all the best kids want to go there.”
Blair coach Jeff Buxton, who has coached Blair for 26 years, said he got over the loss before he left the St. Edward’s gym that night. For him, the dual meet streak was simply a by-product of hard work and luck.
“The most important match is the next one, not anything that’s happened in the past, “he said over scrambled eggs, white toast and bacon at a diner across the street from Blair’s picturesque campus.
The words sound good, but when Buxton is finished he bites his lower lip, the way a widower might when speaking about a wife who just died.
“Time to start another streak, “he adds with a tough smirk.
A PROGRAM LIKE NO OTHER
Buxton has had two hip replacements and walks like a cowboy who just got off a horse. He knows something about streaks. As a high school wrestler in Providence, he never lost.
After a solid college career at the University of Rhode Island, he took the job at Blair because he would have a hard time finding so many kids so committed to the sport he loves anywhere else. Plus, he liked the old-school feel of the facilities, the dull paint job on the walls of the wrestling room and the outdated, 200-foot track that circles it above.
Summers bring Buxton’s famous caveman training, where wrestlers pull cars, pound tractor tires with sledgehammers and toss 25-pound rocks. At the end of practice, the coach unhooks the ropes that hang above the gym and watches the boys climb like orangutans.
At night, Buxton studies film, now available on the Internet, of all the top opponents in the country, so his wrestlers know their tendencies before matches begin.
None of this takes place in secret. There is an open-door policy at Blair’s gym. Want to tangle with the best? Come on in. Last week brought Rey from Hopatcong, who likes to work out with Platt, ranked second in the country at 215 pounds. Three more wrestlers flew up with their coach in a propeller plane from Bucks County, Pa.
Outside Blair’s gym, in a room with no more space for trophies, Blair’s national champions are listed on the wall. The school had 49 from 1937-1988. Since 1989 there have been 78, including four four-time champs, seven three-time champs and 13 two-timers.
Buxton credits the program’s shift from great to dynastic to an agreement he struck in the early 1990s with the coaches of a handful of powerhouse programs around the country. They agreed to face one another at a series of tournaments each year, and quickly word spread that if you wanted to wrestle the best competition in the country, Blair was the place to be.
Tuition that exceeds $36,000 for boarding students, according to Boarding School Review, hasn’t proven to be a big deterrent.
“I always had good horses, but now I have a whole stable, “Buxton said.
It’s a stable that for the first time in years has tasted defeat.
Within an hour after that loss, the team began a quiet bus ride before spending the night in State College, Pa. The next day they watched Penn State wrestle Iowa.
“It had been so long since we lost, we really didn’t know what to feel. “said senior Wes Rosamilia. “You know it happened because you saw it, but it’s still so unbelievable.”
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