Growing a program

There wasn’t much to Evergreen Wrestling Club when Dave Caron watched his first practice 17 years ago.

Including his two children, the club had seven wrestlers, but Caron knew it had the potential to grow.

He started out as a volunteer assistant coach, but it wasn’t long before he got the head job. On his watch, the club grew into one of the most powerful small to medium Little Guy wrestling clubs in Montana and became a pipeline to Kalispell’s high schools, which have combined for six of the last eight Class AA state wrestling championships.

“This club’s kind of neat,” Caron said. “We try to stay affordable. We work with a lot of Evergreen kids that need something constructive to do after school that can’t afford to go somewhere else or might not be able to get rides to and from things of that nature, so I always try to make sure we have mat space in the program to give them something to do six weeks out of the year.”

Seven of Caron’s Evergreen wrestlers have gone on to win state championships at the high school level, including Shaun Lau, a three-time state champion for Flathead High School, and Jackson Barber, a Glacier High School senior who won this year’s Class AA title at 160 pounds.

Caron estimates he’s coached roughly 70 wrestlers who went on to place in the top six of their high school weight classes.

“We’ve had kids place from Polson, Thompson Falls, Cascade-Simms, Whitefish, Columbia Falls, Flathead, Glacier,” he said. “We’ve had a really broad reach as far as high school placers from kids coming and wrestling for us, then moving out of the community and things of that nature.”

While Caron said it’s about the kids, he can’t help but be proud of the accomplishments of his former pupils.

“It means a lot to me, especially when I run into them,” he said. “At the little guy level, we’ll have them for eight or nine years and the high school guys have them for four, so by the time they get them, they’re well on their way if they’re heading in the right direction.”

Barber said Caron helped prepare him for the rigors of high school wrestling.

“From a young age he really taught us what it is to work hard,” Barber said. “It’s helped me in everything I’ve done. He didn’t take it easy on us, it wasn’t fun at the time, but it was worth it.

“The transition from middle school to high school is a really big transition. With those hard practices we did with him, he definitely got us ready for high school.”

In the late 1990s, Evergreen Wrestling Club was cut by the Evergreen school board, but Caron kept the club going as an independent entity and the school allowed the club to continue practicing at the junior high gymnasium. Caron said there was never any doubt that the club would continue to operate.

“At that time we were a pretty big club with some really solid people,” he said. “It was when we were just about ready to feed Flathead. When they had all those runs, a vast majority of those kids came off my mats. I had a fairly strong group of parents at that point and there was really no doubt that we were going to keep it going.”

In 2004, Flathead won its first state championship since 1973, which started a streak of five straight titles.

Evergreen won the small team Little Guy state championship last year with the help of a pair of individual champions, Ryder Day, a freshman at Glacier, and Tanner Fletcher, a freshman at Flathead.

“Once the schools split, we generally at this point feed Glacier due to district boundaries, but I still have a couple kids that will probably end up at Flathead,” Caron said.

While Evergreen Wrestling Club was had a lot of success under Caron’s leadership, he said he’s had a lot of help.

“A lot of good people have helped over the years, as well as some understanding employers who let me manipulate schedules so I could continue coaching.”

Evergreen wrestling club currently has about 40 wrestlers from age 5 to 15. It won its 14th Inter-Valley divisional title Saturday in Eureka and will bring a strong contingent to the Western Montana state championship Friday and Saturday in Kalispell. Caron doesn’t expect a repeat state championship, but he hopes his wrestlers will gain valuable experience.

“I think state’s going to be kind of hard this year because we lack experience, but that will give them experience to take into next year and I like the direction they’re headed,” he said.