When Aaron Flourney heard the Camp Verde wrestling program could be nixed because there wasn’t enough interest in any coaching positions, he knew he had to do something.
“I took that information back to my wife and I just said ‘hey we’re like 0.6 miles away, what do you think, can I do this?’” he said.
He grew up wrestling and taught both his sons while they were growing up. He’s now become the boys head coach for Camp Verde High School and also began a middle school club.
“When you’re building a high school program with whatever it is like, you need to have a middle school program to feed it,” said Emily Lincoln, the girls wrestling head coach.
Lincoln is also new to the program this year.
She and her husband, Eli, help coach the girls and their daughter, Brooke, is a sophomore on the team and saw high results at the team’s first meet on Dec. 2.
“I pinned all of my opponents,” she said. “So you can imagine it was a pretty good start to the season.”
Emily Lincoln said all of the seven girls on the team pinned at least one opponent, and the athletes are learning very well from mistakes and losses.
“I got to kind of work on what I was nervous about and go through the moves I was planning on doing [before I got there],” Brooke Lincoln said.
Over the summer, both teams practiced two or three times a week. All the practices were optional, Emily Lincoln said, and sometimes they had only a few athletes there, and sometimes there were 15 or 16.
“I don’t think that there was a whole lot of coaching. It was because, unless they’re on a club team, I think you have to be really careful about what you can do in the off season,” she said.
During the preseason practices, each athlete had their own regimen. Brooke Lincoln was often lifting weights.
Regina Morales, a senior beginning her third year of wrestling, said she really likes the live matches.
The adrenalin and anxiety makes it exhilarating.
She said she lost two and won two on Dec. 2, which she counts as a good first meet.
“It’s challenging, and forces me to face my fears,” Morales said. “It’s really hard but I love it for that reason, too.”
Flourney said it’s been a process trying to build the team for this season — and into the future. Camp Verde used to be a powerhouse in wrestling, he said, and it will take time to build back up that.
“I didn’t anticipate how many brand new kids we would have,” he said. “So we’ve been having to walk a fine line between teaching the fundamentals to thenew kids and giving the returning wrestlers enough so they can continue to progress.”
But he said with the Lincolns helping out and a few other volunteers from the community, he’s hopeful for the season.
Junior Aiden Dupuy said he’s in his third year wrestling, starting in seventh grade and taking a break in eighth and ninth grades.
While he said he didn’t do particularly well, he likes how he wrestled and is excited for more opportunities to grow as an athlete.
“I wrestled a two-time state champ and then a guy who got second place last year, and then I wrestled the guy who beat him last year,” Dupuy said.
Braydon Rodriquez, a sophomore, said he joined wrestling last year to help him improve in football.
He plays defensive back and wide receiver.
“It’s less running and less conditioning but a lot more technique and we’re definitely a new team and we need that a lot,” he said.
Rodriquez said the practices have been a lot about team building as well. In football, you win as a team and lose as a team, and while wrestling is more individual, they’re still a team.
“We got our lunch money taken, but I think everybody has a heart the size of this room, so there’s no giving up,” Rodriquez said.
The Camp Verde boys wrestling team is hosting its first home meet of the season on Wednesday, Dec. 10, against Hayden and Miami high schools at 4 p.m.
Both teams are hosting home events on Wednesday, Jan. 7, at 4 p.m. The boys are against American Leadership Academy — Anthem South, Fountain Hills and Joseph City. The girls are against only Fountain Hills and Joseph City.
