Five Questions with Simley High School Wrestling Coach Will Short

Simley High School's wrestling team ended another championship season with a Section 4AA crown, a fourth consecutive Class AA state title and four individual state champions, Pedro DeLao, Kyle Gliva, Jake Short and Nick Wanzek. Inver Grove Heights Patch sat down with co-head coach Will Short to get his take on the season.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: What was the highlight of the year for you?

Coach Will Short: The highlight for me is always when the kids achieve their goals. At the beginning of the year we talk about goals and we set goals and, interestingly enough, [this year] we set a goal to win our fourth straight team title and to somehow get four individual champions, which would break the record of only having three. We’d done three a couple of times but we’d never had four. So that was a highlight that we achieved that goal, but I’ll be honest with you, I thought I could have six. So along with some kids having some great success in achieving their goals, we had had some kids who just missed achieving their goals. So with the highs came a little bit of disappointment with some kids. But the overall season was a great success. And every one of the kids in this program worked extremely hard. They sacrificed a great deal to earn the things that they earned.

Patch: Do people outside the program appreciate how hard it is to be this successful?

Short: This is a tricky thing to say because I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s bitter, but I think people in Inver Grove Heights and at Simley High School have come to expect us to do these things every year and I don’t know if they appreciate how hard it is. There are some very good programs out there that very easily could have been in the matches with us, but our kids did the work and they did the work — now we’ve been going on four years and it’s a tremendous amount of effort by a lot of people and it is a difficult task to win a state championship.

Patch: Was there a wrestler you thought really exceeded expectations?

Short: Yes, Pedro DeLao. Pedro was behind two very good wrestlers last year in Juan Torres and Dylan Wright, and we knew that Pedro was very good. We knew that he would have a very good chance of doing well at the state tournament. But to have never been in the state tournament before, never been a qualifier, never wrestled in the section tournament yet, to go in his first year competing at sections and state to win it was really a testament to how much character that young man has. And how he persevered over the course of his ninth and 10th grade year and hung in there even though he wasn’t a varsity guy, even though he wasn’t the main guy. He is a model of what we want our students to be that aren’t the No. 1 guy.

Patch: Anyone else?

Short: Another guy who exceeded expectations was Matt Kruse. Matt was a senior captain and had been a backup. Last year he was behind two state champions as a junior, behind Jake Short and Tommy Glenn. Both guys, 130, 135, state champions. That’s what he was staring at his whole junior year trying to make the team. Finally gets his chance this year, Matt had never wrestled in a section or state tournament as well. And Matt goes in and gets fourth place in the state. He exceeded. At every individual tournament he was seeded lower than he placed. Every one. He was underestimated from day one of his senior year. Just talk about exceeding expectations: Matt was just a great person in the room, he came every day, worked hard, trained hard and he was an example for young kids in our program.

Patch: Any regrets? Any missed opportunities this year?

Short: Here’s what I’ll say. Let’s throw regret out and let’s say do I have things that I thought could have been accomplished that weren’t accomplished this season? Yes. We had some kids who I believe were good enough to win that we didn’t get to win. Obviously we were successful with four guys, but we missed opportunities with three others.