In wake of the alleged inappropriate conduct with a female minor by Carlos Zavalza — an assistant coach with the New Breed wrestling program in Camp Verde — changes have been made to more closely monitor the wrestling program in Camp Verde.
New Breed, which acted as the umbrella to the Cowboys’ offseason wrestling program, is gone. It is now simply known as Camp Verde Wrestling. The liability of the goings-on in the wrestling room now entirely falls on Camp Verde High School, said high school head wrestling coach Tracy Tudor. What remains is a year-round program that still aims to continue its success over the years.
“It’s still the Camp Verde wrestling program and it always was. In light of what happened with Carlos … [it] has put us under a microscope. They wanted to figure out if the program had anything to do with it, and it didn’t,” Tudor said.
“What they’ve done, just for liability reasons, is Camp Verde High School has retained the responsibility of the Camp Verde wrestling program, minus the Chagolla Foundation. That’s taken all of the liability off of Coach [Mario] Chagolla [Sr.], and basically put all of the liability on Camp Verde High School wrestling.
“We’re still going to do the summer program just like we always have. It’ll be open to middle school and high school kids.They’ll have to be Camp Verde kids that actually come into the program and get training, but that’s how it really always was. Now it’s just rubberstamped in writing that’s how it’s got to be.”
New Breed began during the late 1990s to early 2000s, Tudor said, and it was tied together with the Chagolla Foundation, headed up by Chagolla. New Breed controlled offseason wrestling, which ran from spring through fall.
New Breed is gone, and the Chagolla Foundation is not associated with Camp Verde wrestling.
“The issue was that New Breed was a 501(c)(3). It was a private entity, and the summer program was run by New Breed, but it was still Camp Verde coaches kind of meshing in with New Breed. There wasn’t a clear division between when the regular season ended and when summer started,” Tudor said.
The same roster of coaches — excluding Zavalza — will stay on board to coach the Cowboys: Tudor, Chagolla, Larry Allred, Travis Black, Jeremy Uhler and Jake Wolfe.
The Arizona Interscho-lastic Association passed legislation in spring 2017 that allowed high school coaches to coach their athletes in the offseason. Before that, coaches would have to run offseason clubs that were open to any athlete in order to continue coaching.
Despite the fact that New Breed has dissolved, Tudor and his staff are able to continue working with their wrestlers.
There is doubt as to whether the summertime Weekend Wars — biweekly, open-wrestling competitions that
amplified wrestlers’ offseason mat time — will continue. Wrestlers came from around Arizona and out of state, and anyone was welcome to come into the room; continuing to do the competitions would carry the risk of allowing an incident in similar nature to the one that sparked the changes to happen again.
Only Camp Verde middle and high school wrestlers can come into the room and train. Tudor said he has the option to continue Weekend Wars, but likely will not.
“I’m not counting it out completely, but I would rather take our kids to tournaments in New Mexico or Nevada in the summertime and maybe have a couple of invites where teams can come to our room and wrestle us,” Tudor said. “Just to do Weekend Wars, that’s on the table, but I’m not sure I’m going to do it.”
The Cowboys returned to practice on April 14. Tudor was adamant that while the incident, which happened in early March, has made a big impact on the program from a morale standpoint, it will not affect their performances.
“That is devastating to us. It devastated our room, it devastated our community, it devastated our wrestling family,” Tudor said. “Not how things were, but we are going to go back to wrestling hard again.”
