For more than a century’s worth of Colorado high school state wrestling tournaments, the sage and the soothsayer have been unrelenting constants.
This weekend, the sage — retired — is at his 75th consecutive state tournament. And the soothsayer — Tim Yount, the founder of the wrestling publication and rankings service — is at his 37th straight state tournament.
Between Smith and Yount, they have a combined 112 years of experience covering Colorado high school wrestling on its biggest stage. If you want to know anything about the tournament, past or present, the two men who sit right near each other matside along CHSAA’s elevated floor seating are the men to ask.
“Bob is our official wrestling historian, and he shows up every year feeding off the energy of the coaches and the kids,” CHSAA wrestling commissioner John Sullivan observed. “He’s here early in the mornings when our volunteers get here, and he doesn’t leave until the last match is done. There’s not a single major decision I make about the tournament without running it by him.
“And with Tim, you can always see him standing at the table back here (above the mats), trying to watch every single match at the same time. If you miss a match that you wanted to see, you can go up to him and you’ll get the play-by-play — first-round, consolation match, finals match, it doesn’t matter. No one is more on top of the tournament and the state’s wrestlers than him.”
‘The Godfather of Colorado Wrestling’
Smith, 90, and Yount, 61, took different roads to becoming pillars of Colorado wrestling’s annual marquee event.
Smith’s first state tournament came in 1952, when he was a wrestler for Denver North. He qualified for the tournament in three years, including placing fourth as a junior and third as a senior. When he went to wrestle at Colorado State College (now Northern Colorado), where he was the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference’s 115-pound champion in 1958, he came back each year to watch the state tournament.
After college, Smith started a storied coaching career at Wray. In 33 years from ’58 to 1991, Smith’s Eagles won 10 state titles and he coached 39 individual wrestling champions. Wray also was runner-up seven times and third three times, a dynastic success that Smith attributes to a feeder wrestling program that was ahead of its time.
Matt Brown, the Eagles’ current head coach, calls Smith “the Godfather of Colorado wrestling” for the blueprint that he put in place in Wray that other coaches soon copied. Smith coached Brown for three years in high school, and Brown also went through the feeder program where high school wrestlers would coach third through sixth graders for six weeks during a mini-season that culminated in a tournament sponsored by the local VFW chapter.
“It was just Wray kids wrestling Wray kids, long before there was really any peewee wrestling or a youth tournament circuit,” Brown said. “And the little kids, they stayed with the same high schooler as their coach for their four years in the program. It taught the young kids the technique that Bob wanted emphasized, and created pride in the program at all levels.”
During his time at Wray, Smith became an advocate for the sport. In the mid-70s, he led the charge for CHSAA to recognize more placers at the state tournament; as a result, in 1976, the tournament started awarding six places in each weight instead of four.
And Smith was instrumental in getting the state tournament, which was previously held at separate venues for the different classifications, to be unified in one building. That finally happened in 1987 at McNichols Arena, and then the tournament moved to the then-Pepsi Center in 2000, and has been at “The Can” ever since.
“They wouldn’t start giving fifth and sixth place at the state tournament until he raised hell about it and said he was going to buy the awards himself,” Brown said. “I’m sure he probably wrote 500 letters to CHSAA pushing the issue. And he worked just as tirelessly to make sure this tournament finally got the biggest and best venue that it deserved.”
After leaving Wray, Smith became the head coach at Fort Hayes State in Kansas, but would return to the state tournament every season during that nine-year stint to recruit.
In the quarter-century since, Smith has remained a fixture at the tournament, helping with weigh-ins, recognizing the newest class of the Colorado chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame each year, and providing a sounding board for CHSAA as it relates to logistical questions or changes. Three years ago, CHSAA named an MVP honor The Bob Smith Most Outstanding Wrestler Award is now presented in each classification at the conclusion of the tournament.
Smith admits that “I don’t know what 90 is supposed to feel like.”
“Am I addicted to this? Hell yes, you can say that,” Smith said. “I’m a junkie for this.”
‘The go-to source’
But for all of Smith’s historical wisdom, even he admits that Yount “knows the teams and the wrestlers better than I do.”
As part of On The Mat, for the past 32 years, Yount has predicted the individual title winners in every bracket, plus the placers and the top 10 teams.
His success in forecasting the tournament, which is based on in-depth analysis and following all of the state’s top grapplers throughout each season, is impressive. Last year, he correctly predicted 85% of the individual winners, 83% of the placers and had a 90% accuracy in determining who the top 10 teams in each classification would be.
Who needs when you have Yount to track the wrestling?
“I will have parents come up to me and be like, ‘I’m in a (betting) pool with my buddies for the tournament. Can I use your rankings?'” Yount said with a laugh. “Since the beginning, when I started On The Mat with my brother (Kent Yount), I wanted everything in my publication that would raise the profile of this sport. From rankings to interviews and other content, everything that really is important for people to know about for Colorado high school wrestling, we want to cover.”
Yount grew up in a wrestling family in Atwood, Kansas, and was immersed in the sport from a very young age. His first CHSAA state tournament came in 1989, when he had just moved to Denver for an internship with the U.S. Olympic Committee.
That internship led to Yount’s career overseeing sports development for where he has worked for decades. On The Mat has been a passion project all along, and Yount’s signature at the state tournament is standing up at his matside table as he follows every single match with a stack of printed brackets in front of him.
He can often be seen intently studying a match on the other side of the arena from behind his rectangular glasses, only to break his focus and quickly swivel his head to another match when he hears a rise in hooping and hollering from the crowd.
Filling out each bracket by hand is a habit that goes back to his youth wrestling days.
“I’ve been doing that since Day 1,” Yount said. “My mom used to give me a hard time about it when I was a kid. Because I’d be wrestling at a tournament and carrying around (a stack of papers) to fill out the brackets as the tournament progressed. I’ve always loved the stats and data that came with this sport.”
Cherokee Trail head coach Jeff Buck, who is also from Atwood, says Yount is “the go-to source” for Colorado high school wrestling.
“The attention and promotion he has brought to the sport is incredible, and when he’s ranking 14 kids (or more) in each weight class, sometimes that’s all a kid needs is to see his name in those rankings and they start to believe in themselves,” Buck said. “I use the rankings as a (reference tool) as a coach, and all the coaches know he does his research.
“He’s boots-on-the-ground at tournaments, he’s at regionals, he’s always reaching out for results. He’s an indispensable resource for the sport in Colorado — we couldn’t do it without him.”
More tournaments to come
While Yount has developed a near-superpower of watching 12 mats at once, Smith, for the most part, relaxes in his seat and enjoys the show at Ball Arena while Yount scribbles on his brackets.
But every so often, Smith will see something that makes him shout out, or stand up and cheer — especially for his beloved Wray Eagles. The intense coach who built the Wray juggernaut that’s now at a state-best 16 state titles is still within Smith, who’s never been able to stop watching wrestling, even when he’s told he has to leave.
“In his last year at Wray (in 1991), he got kicked out of a small tournament in Kansas — it was his first and only (high school) ejection,” Brown recalled with a smile. “But after he left the gym, we could see him peeking through the circular window on the door. He wasn’t tall enough to see through (standing normally), but we could see him watching matches (on his tiptoes).”
Smith says his stellar 1969 team at Wray stands out in his memory, as the Eagles won the team championship while five individuals won their respective brackets. For Yount, one anecdote he always comes back to is how he saw one wrestler about a dozen years ago transform from winning three matches as a junior to a state champion as a senior.
“That kid worked his butt off in the summer before his senior year. He spent countless hours on the mat, spent time going to tournaments,” Yount said. “Those are the underdog stories that I love tracking, because this sport will often give back what you put into it. That’s why I love it.”
Yount is nearing retirement from his gig with USA Triathlon, which he hopes will help On The Mat “reach new audiences” with an expansion of the site’s coverage. In that way, the end of his main career will allow his side-gig to become his new, full-time job.
As for Smith?
“I’ll keep coming to this tournament until they put me in the box.”
