HOW THEY WERE BUILT: Post Falls High wrestling — With help from strong club programs, a powerhouse in the making

It wasn’t like the cupboard was bare when Pete Reardon took over as head coach of the Post Falls High wrestling program in 2009.

The Trojans were already a solid program in North Idaho and statewide under Dennis Amende, who coached Post Falls’ first three-time state champion in Al Mack (1996-98).

When Amende stepped down after 18 seasons, Reardon came to Post Falls from his previous head coaching job at Kentlake High in Kent, Wash.

What followed is an amazing run in which the Trojans have won the state 5A wrestling championship in five of the last six seasons — and the one year they didn’t win it, they were second.

All told, under Reardon, Post Falls has won the five state titles, finished second three times, third once, sixth once and seventh once. The Trojans benefit from a feeder system which features not one, but two, club wrestling programs.

“The barn was definitely not empty when I took over,” said Reardon, who had wrestled at North Idaho College and at Central Washington, and had also been an assistant coach at NIC for a few seasons. “The youth programs in the area were already really strong. The Post Falls Wrestling Club, the Booths and the Osts and the Bergers had been running that for a number of years, then the Real Life thing was really on the upswing when I took this job. The clubs were really pretty strong. So a lot of that stuff was already in place, and the high school program was already pretty strong as well.

“Coach Amende, he could have hung around another couple of years, and had great success, because there was a lot of stuff coming.”

THE POST Falls Wrestling Club was started back in the early 1980s, and one of those who helped start the program was John Thompson, who would become Reardon’s father-in-law.

The Real Life Wrestling Club was newer, and had been going for a few years before Reardon took over.

“When I came in, I saw an opportunity to make some connections with the Real Life folks,” said Reardon, 43. “I already knew Lonnie Lovett a little bit and I knew Jim Putman because he had married my wife and I; he had helped start the program. And I knew the Booths through my family, through my wife’s family, so I already had connections with some of the folks that were already here. Maybe I could come in and bridge some of those gaps, and build it from there.”

The Booths and the Osts, etc., had been running the Post Falls Wrestling Club for some two decades, and when they were ready to move on, a couple years after Reardon was named coach of the high school team, Reardon took over as head of that club, helped by a group of parents, most with wrestlers in the high school program, or coming up.

“But I work really closely with the Real Life guys,” Reardon said.

Domination took a few years. Some years, because of the slim number of qualifiers alloted to North Idaho, Post Falls was unable to qualify the numbers it needed to contend for a state title.

Other years, there were other strong teams in North Idaho that were just a little better.

In Reardon’s first two seasons at Post Falls, Coeur d’Alene won back-to-back state titles. The following year, in 2012, the Trojans were second at state to 5A Inland Empire League foe Lewiston.

Post Falls finished sixth at state in 2009, Amende’s last season. Under Reardon, the Trojans were sixth in 2010 and seventh in ’11. Post Falls was runner-up to Centennial in 2013, then placed third in 2014.

Then the run began.

Post Falls won the program’s first state title in 2015, led by state champs Drake Foster, Alius De La Rosa, TJ Wolf, Seth McLeod and Justin Farnsworth.

The Trojans repeated in 2016, then finished second to Columbia in 2017, during a cycle in which the Nampa mat powerhouse was in 5A (Columbia is in 4A now).

In 2018, the start of the current three-peat, Post Falls had 10 in the finals, had seven state champions, and set the state team scoring record (for all classifications) with 338.5 points.

Under Reardon, Post Falls has produced 38 state individual champions and 110 state placers in 11 seasons. He’s coached an undefeated four-time state champion (Ridge Lovett, 169-0) and another four-time champion (Alius De La Rosa), and has coached three three-time state champions (James Ost, Drake Foster and A.J. De La Rosa).

The Trojans have won six straight Region 1 titles.

“It’s a ton of legwork by all those awesome youth coaches, and middle school coaches, and my high school coaches too,” Reardon said of the current run. “It’s Lonnie and Abel (De La Rosa) and all those other guys, Brandon Mason, and all of us working at the youth level. And then when we get ’em to the high school, they’ve been experienced.

“And it does take some time to get that ball rolling. I sort of think of it as a big flywheel ... it’s hard at first, but once you pick up some momentum, you can get rolling. Then you’ve got to keep it rolling. But it’s not as hard to keep it rolling once you have some momentum.”

WHAT’S THE “secret” to the Trojans’ success?

“It’s numbers, and quality,” Reardon said. “We found out, my first few years here, we’re going to have to qualify a lot of kids ... we’ve just got to get better, man. That’s the numbers side, we have to have more kids in our program. We can’t have 40 kids in our program; we need to have 60, 70, 80 kids.”

In Reardon’s first year as head coach, he said Post Falls probably had 35-40 kids in the high school program.

This year, the Trojans started the season with 83.

That’s where the youth programs come into play.

“If we have 100 kids in our youth programs, there’s a good chance by the time they get to high school, we’re going to have a freshman class of 20 or 30 kids. Hopefully our middle school programs have 30 or 40 kids in each program. In those 25, 30 kids that come into the high school program in the ninth grade, if you have three or four or five or six of them that are pretty accomplished wrestlers, now you have the numbers and the quality.”

When Reardon started at Post Falls, he said the Real Life club had some 80-100 kids. The Post Falls club had around 30.

Now, both have roughly the same amount of wrestlers.

“Between the two, there’s probably around 150 between the two clubs,” he said.

And those numbers came into play this year. Sure, Post Falls had a couple state champs in AJ De La Rosa and Ethan Miller, but also had seven other placers — and needed every point from each of them to win by four points over Highland of Pocatello.

“Like Zach Campbell, our 98-pounder, who got in as a wild card, and he placed sixth,” Reardon said. “And we won by four points, and he scored 10 team points himself. Isaiah Laguna (195 pounds), in his match to get in for third and fourth place, he was losing 7-0, and ends up pinning the kid, and that’s a 10-point swing. And there was probably 10 other matches like that.

“It was 100 percent a total team effort.”

HOW LONG will Reardon coach at Post Falls?

He admits it’s a labor of love, but it’s also a lot of hard work.

“We have a big family of wrestling,” Reardon said of the community. “There’s probably about 12 to 15 families that are tight-knit, and help coach, or help run the program. They volunteer time at tournaments, ship kids around to tournaments ... that makes a big difference. It’s easy to wear out, no doubt. And the part that makes it fun is doing it with other people — being part of something that’s bigger than yourself.”

Reardon’s youngest kid, Reise, is a third-grader and is a wrestler. If his son sticks with it, Reardon says he’d like to coach him through his high school career.

Sort of like another longtime Post Falls coach, Mike McLean, whose youngest son is in seventh grade and plays basketball. McLean has made it no secret to his superiors that when Trenton graduates, Mike will be done as Trojans coach.

“There’s a good likelihood that could be like that for me, too,” Reardon said with a laugh.

But until then, there’s more work to be done.

“I’ll be the first to tell you, I have benefitted from so many great people around me, man,” Reardon said. “Our high school coaches and our club coaches are awesome people. ... it’s been very awesome to be part of. I feel very humbled and blessed to be a part of it.”