OREGON CITY — Even by the shoestring-budget standards of community college athletics, the wrestling team’s 58-by-32-foot mat room at Clackamas Community College can feel to coach Josh Rhoden like his team is practicing in a “closet.”
He’s not wrong.
Before the practice room’s blue mats and white padded walls held one of the country’s top community college wrestling programs, the space stored athletic equipment. The room is so small, it’s safest if only four bouts take place concurrently while 30 other teammates are forced to stand and watch. Even getting inside isn’t easy. Visitors learn quickly to yank hard on a sticky door handle.
When Rhoden hosts recruits on campus visits, the mat room is the last stop, and a quick one.
“We do everything else you can possibly do,” Rhoden said. “Then we go in there and they say, ‘”This is where you guys wrestle? Really?'”
In a way, it’s a compliment. By now, the 11th-year coach understands reactions like that speak not only to recruits’ disbelief at the room’s size, but the eye-opening accomplishments that have come out of there in spite of it.
In its past decade of dominance, the Clackamas Community College wrestling program has won the 2011 National Junior College Athletic Association championship; crowned six individual national champions; produced an annual average of five All-Americans and five transfers to four-year schools; and won four consecutive national dual meet titles, a streak it extended last month.
There might not be another wrestling room in the country that produces as much success per square foot.
If the ceiling were high enough, or the budget big enough, Rhoden might hang banners to commemorate those results. Instead, on the exposed brick underneath the mat room’s bank of windows, each season’s accomplishments are handwritten in chalk. They tell the story as clearly as anything — modest means, eye-popping results.
Yet even at a program that has come to expect success, this year’s bunch has already achieved history after blowing through the school’s first undefeated regular season. That run, wrestlers say, has been keyed by a tightly knit roster and more time off to recuperate, which has improved the team’s health entering the season’s all-important final month. Clackamas (16-0) competes Sunday at the West Region Championships in Coos Bay in what is a prelude to the national junior college championship meet, held Feb. 24-25 in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
“It kind of means nothing without a national title,” freshman Colt Doyle said of the undefeated start.
Maybe so, but the success has been savored thus far. Their perfect record includes victories against a pair of four-year schools.
“I think community college teams are associated with being a step or two below small colleges, but when we go out and scrimmage the four-years in basketball, softball, you name it, it’s very similar,” Clackamas athletic director Jim Martineau said. “And in wrestling’s case, they’re quite a bit above them.”
Like a victory by Josh Reyes, the team’s 149-pound redshirt sophomore who is 29-1, Clackamas’ success has a way of feeling inevitable. The school has fielded a wrestling team every year since 1969 and produced 128 All-Americans. Yet 53 of them have come in just the last decade, coinciding with Rhoden’s tenure, a stretch in which Clackamas has finished no worse than eighth in the country.
But if success is now the rule at Clackamas, this season has gone beyond what was perhaps expected. After beginning the season ranked 11th in the national coaches poll, the Cougars now are second, behind only reigning national champion Northeastern Oklahoma A&M.
Should the Cougars win a national title, it will likely be due to their depth. A Clackamas wrestler is ranked in Intermat’s national top 10 in all but three of those weight classes, led by top-ranked Kurt Mode (141) and Reyes (149). David Campbell (125) and Doyle (174), meanwhile, each are ranked second. During January’s 12-team Clackamas Open, Cougars wrestlers swept the top three spots at 149 pounds.
They might be even deeper if Rhoden didn’t have to turn away potential wrestlers due to the dearth of practice space.
The esteem surrounding the Cougars’ program stands in stark contrast to its national profile when Rhoden took over. Shortly after his hiring in 2006, he learned that new Oregon State coach Jim Zalesky — a brand-name coach who’d won three NCAA titles in his previous job as coach of powerhouse Iowa — had referred a high school recruit to a community college in Iowa, believing it would help the wrestler’s exposure to go out-of-state.
Rhoden was in his mid-20s, barely out of college after wrestling at Clackamas, Pacific Lutheran and Pacific, a career that was shaped, he said, by watching old tapes of Zalesky’s college matches. Nervously, Rhoden picked up the phone and called Corvallis. He recalls the conversation fondly now: one part scolding Zalesky for recommending an out-of-state school, and one part begging him to give Clackamas a chance to be the next school he recommended.
“I didn’t know Josh at the time, but after he made that call, I had a lot of respect for him,” Zalesky said last week. “He’s done a really good job up there. It’s one of the top junior college programs in the country.
“He just does a good job getting the most out of his guys. Everybody’s pulling for each other and that’s something you look at as a coach.”
Eleven years later, the Beavers’ 2017 recruiting class includes Mode and Doyle, and OSU has hosted Reyes on a visit, as well. They are three headliners of what could be a bumper crop of transfers. At least 10 other wrestlers have taken official recruiting visits to campuses across the country, Rhoden said.
Martineau believes schools are interested in Cougars wrestlers, in part, because few have academic problems that might complicate a transfer. The wrestling team posted an average 3.2 GPA in the fall, and no athlete in any of Clackamas’ winter sports has been ineligible this winter due to academics, according to Martineau.
“It definitely speaks volumes to our (Clackamas) program as a whole and especially Josh as a coach,” Martineau said. “Kids are coming to work with him. Part of it is just reputation.”
Rhoden is first to say he doesn’t have all the answers, and after a second-place finish at nationals in 2015 that still carries a sour taste, followed by a disappointing sixth-place finish last season, he desperately sought solutions last spring. It led to a key tweak to his coaching philosophy, one he says is paying dividends this winter.
Roughly every five weeks, wrestlers this season have received between four and eight days off at a time. He credits the idea to a phone call he had last spring with Nick Mitchell, the coach of NAIA’s top-ranked team, Grand View (Iowa). Mitchell said the approach would let wrestlers recuperate aching muscles, improve lagging grades and clear clouded minds.
“They feel good, and now we can just go beat people up that don’t feel good,” Rhoden said.
Said Doyle: “Now having weeks off, it makes you hungry. When can we get back?”
The approach to time off was new to Rhoden, but it’s very much in line with an old-school community college philosophy: wring as much as you can out of every resource. Forget keeping up with the Cougars’ conference peers — its mat room has a fraction of the space and amenities of even Doyle’s old Southern California high school. Reyes arrived in Oregon City after two years at Boise State, where he trained in a 4,000-square-foot facility that is more than double the size of the training space at Clackamas.
Making do means getting creative: Rhoden rents mat room space from nearby Oregon City High School in the fall, before the prep season begins. When that is no longer an option, practices are split. Half the Cougars might show up at 4 p.m., the other half at 5:30.
“For a team dynamic, that isn’t great,” said Rich Vigorito, a Clackamas assistant for the past decade. “You kind of want the whole team in the room at once.”
Help could soon be on the way.
Martineau has opened discussions with campus leaders about transforming underutilized classroom space in Randall Hall’s second floor into a new, nearly 3,000-square-foot wrestling room. There’s been no formal approval, but Martineau characterized the reception as positive. His pitch frames the project as a benefit for both school and team: With more room for more wrestlers, Rhoden can expand the roster, bringing the team even more depth and the school a few more tuition-paying students.
Should approval be granted this spring, he believes the project potentially could be finished in time for the start of the 2017-18 season, next fall.
But until the project is approved, Clackamas wrestlers continue to wait.
And win.
“You can have all the money in the world,” Mode said, referencing Clackamas’ modest resources, “but you can’t pay a kid to treat their teammate like family and have their back.”
— Andrew Greif
agreif@oregonian.com
@andrewgreif
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