Jake Eitzen was feeling pretty good about himself after winning a wrestling league title in middle school.
Then he met Don Patterson, the new varsity coach at Estes Park High School and a 220-pound bundle of wrestling experience and knowledge, who had just one question for the 100-pound Eitzen.
“Do you want to be a state champion?”
“I said, ‘OK’ and he said, ‘Well, we better start soon,’ ” Eitzen said.
Two days later Patterson met Eitzen in a downstairs room at the local athletic club to begin his education on what it takes to be aggressive.
“He pummeled me into oblivion,” Eitzen recalled with unmistakable pride. “He just threw me around the room.”
The story gets better. A woman getting ready for yoga happened to peer in the window, then ran upstairs and told the staff that “a man was beating up some child.”
Eitzen feels pretty good about himself today. The senior won state last season at the Class 3A 119-pound weight class after placing sixth as a sophomore and second as a 103-pound freshman. He is wrestling at 130 this season, though he might drop to 125 for state.
Next season Eitzen will wrestle at Wyoming, which makes him one of the first recruits by first-year Cowboys coach Mark Branch, who was an assistant coach and former standout at national powerhouse Oklahoma State.
“He’s pretty much one of those kids that every program would love to have, high school or college,” Patterson said.
Eitzen is like a son to Patterson, who spurned wrestling scholarships to join the Coast Guard and later used the money and free time to travel and wrestle.
Eitzen, an honorable mention all-state running back with a 3.65 grade-point average, is the leader in the Bobcats’ wrestling room and tries to help impart Patterson’s mantra that there is always better competition to be found.
During the first wrestling practice after the holiday break, Patterson told his team to run around a lake, or run five miles up a mountain. Eitzen and teammate Logan Stetson picked the tougher challenge, the mountain.
“We did it,” Eitzen said.
Like most top wrestlers, Eitzen travels the country in search of top competition.
“The pressure is never off,” Eitzen said of having achieved winning state, which was his goal. “There’s a target on my back, but I’m all for it. That’s what it is all about, right? The tough matches and people gunning for you?”
Eitzen now realizes it’s OK to feel good about yourself. Patterson has forced Eitzen to look at himself with a confidence he believes is essential to thriving at the collegiate level.
It’s not cockiness, Eitzen stresses, but “if you don’t have confidence, you’re not going to hang.”
Eitzen’s battles in the wrestling room with his assistant coaches and Patterson have gotten better since that day when he served as a 100-pound rag doll. Patterson’s list of injuries from wrestling the 130-pound Eitzen includes concussions, broken noses, a ruptured toenail, a torn ear, cracked ribs and dislocated fingers.
“I think what separates the people that are really good and the people that are decent, are the good guys can come back,” Eitzen said.
