“Reversals are scored when a wrestler, controlled by the opponent on the mat, executes a move that allows him to assume a controlling position on top of the opponent, thus reversing the situation.”
UPPER LAKE — In the lexicon of wrestling, Nice resident Robbie Avery began his life in the “down” position. As a tot, the Upper Lake High School senior was all but pinned to the mat.
A huge scar remains from the open-heart surgery he underwent when only 4. There are mental scars from his childhood years, too, but Avery says he doesn”t want to go there. Suffice it to say his was not a conventional childhood.
But why dwell on the negative for a youth who, largely through his own grit, has put such a positive spin on his life.
His reversal, says Upper Lake wrestling coach Tom Cox, “is one of the best stories I”ve seen in 15 years of coaching.”
At this point, the Robbie Avery story is one of a young athlete who has just completed his four years on the Cougar wrestling team with a sparkling record of 150 wins against only 39 losses, including a 47-10 mark for the season just ended. He is among the top 12 in his 140-pound weight class in California.
No less important, he is better than 3.0 in the classroom.
All of which is amazing when considering Robbie”s status when he began high school.
“Kids who have open-heart surgery are slow to develop,” said Cox. “So he is a year behind everyone else and a little older. In his freshman year he was not a very good student and hung around with a crowd that was questionable. He was expelled from Upper Lake Middle School; I don”t know what for.”
Upper Lake instructional aide Julie Erlandson recalled Avery as a hard case. “So much so that I had to write him a discipline referral,” she said.
Avery, she added, was just a skip and a jump from being assigned to a more controlled form of education called continuation school, “which is the last chance before you end up in court school.”
But that”s all in the distant past now, Erlandson added, because with each year Avery showed an improvement in discipline.
“I”m amazed,” she said. “It”s like night and day.”
Those who have watched Avery”s transformation from problem child to an admirable young man agree that wrestling is what turned him around.
“He took to it immediately,” says Ron Campos, a coach who shared Cox”s faith in Robbie to the extent he came out of retirement to work with him.
“He was headed for a bit of trouble,” Campos acknowledged. “But when he got into wrestling he just turned his life around. I was out of wrestling, but he, along with Tom, got me back into it. As soon as I saw Robbie, he grabbed my heart. He was a perfect kid.”
Avery”s excellence on the mat had an inauspicious start.
“Funny thing,” said Cox. “He was a freshman out for the wrestling team and didn”t know a thing about it. He was competing in the novice division in our first meet at Middletown and started in the down position. I said, ?Robbie, stand up!” and he said, ?I can”t.”
By the end of that first year, though, it became clear that Avery was a stand-up kind of athlete who would one day lead his team through sheer determination. He concluded his freshman season by defeating the league”s third-best wrestler in his weight class.
By his sophomore year, Avery was second in Coastal Mountain Conference in his weight class and was among the top 12 out of130 high school wrestlers who participated in a frosh-soph meet.
“That was probably his first vision of ?We”re going to do this,”” said Cox.
The Upper Lake coach can put his finger on the exact moment that the metamorphisis of Robbie Avery from a kid who “just wanted to fight somebody” to team leader was completed.
“Robbie didn”t qualify for the sectional tournament after losing to a guy he had beaten two weeks before,” Cox recalled. “He went as an alternate and was captivated watching a sophomore named Jason Welch, whom you could argue was the best wrestler ever in California high schools.”
After observing the dominant style of Welch, who became a three-time state high school champion, said Cox, “Robbie decided wrestling was going to be his thing. That day our program turned around.”
He added, “Robbie kind of mapped out a plan. He would wrestle in the spring and work in the summer, when he baled more than 15,000 bales of hay.”
Between his sophomore and junior years, Avery progressed further by attending a camp operated by University of Minnesota wrestling coach Jay Robinson.
Robbie was further inspired by former teammate D.J. Navarro, whom Cox said had been “the one good wrestler” when he began coaching at Upper Lake four years ago.
“He told me ?You can be good,”” said Robbie.
His mother, Laurie, “has done a remarkable job as a single parent to Avery,” said Campos.
What he”ll do now that his high school career is complete is uncertain. Cox says several colleges have inquired about Avery.
Robbie, however, says for the immediate future he wants to take a break from the rigors of conditioning. His long-term objective at the moment is to follow a line of education that would lead to his becoming a professional designer.
There is, however, a clear indication that his break from his sport won”t be for long. He has taken it upon himself to study the Greco-Roman freestyle system. And that can only mean that he is thinking of wrestling at the international level.
“I just want to try it out and see what I can do,” says Robbie.
The Olympics, perhaps?
For Robbie Avery, nothing is impossible.
