UPPER LAKE — Tom Cox won”t be back to win a fifth straight Coastal Mountain Conference championship at Upper Lake High School, but that doesn”t mean the Cougars won”t carry on in his absence.
Cox, who along with assistant Ron Campos built the Northshore high school”s wrestling program into one of the best in the small-school ranks, is the Record-Bee”s 2011-12 Coach of the Year for boys” sports. He is being honored along with Campos as the two were an inseparable team for the Cougars.
While Cox resigned his coaching and teaching position at Upper Lake last month to take a new job with the Glenn County Unified School District, most likely at Willows High School, the Cougars” top-notch wrestling program will no doubt continue to rack up victories with the likes of veteran stars Ward Beecher and Joey Valdez returning next season.
“Ron has an energy you can”t believe and he runs the best practices I”ve seen,” Cox said of Campos, who is the heir apparent to the Upper Lake wrestling job.
Under Cox and Campos, the Cougars have won four straight conference championships and four straight North Coast Section Team Dual titles. They”ve also put together an impressive 36-match winning streak in CMC competition.
Among the worst CMC wrestling programs when Cox took over seven years ago, Upper Lake has been and remains the team to beat since pulling down its first CMC championship toward the end of the 2008-09 campaign, which coincidentally is the season Campos came on board as a full-time assistant coach.
The Cox-Campos pairing has been nothing but a winner for the Cougars.
“He was kind of officially retired,” Cox said of Campos, who had previous head coaching experience at Clear Lake and Kelseyville high schools. “That first year (2008-09), that”s when we needed Ron.”
A senior-dominated team that season, Campos was exactly the something extra the Cougars needed to ignite a four-year run as conference champions, according to Cox.
“Ron has the ability to take a good wrestler and make him even better,” Cox said. “Having him work with the superstars enabled me to focus on the whole team, work with kids who maybe hadn”t had a lot of success in the past, but were capable of becoming good wrestlers.
“You don”t build with superstars alone, you need the other guys as well,” Cox said. “It fit perfectly having Ron.”
Even with a bull”s-eye on their back since winning that initial title in 2009, the Cougars have dominated the opposition for the most part, especially in a conference where they were lucky to win a single match back when Cox joined the program in 2006.
Fast-forward six years later to their reign over the CMC, one that has a good chance of continuing even with the likes of Robert Simondi, Bradley Brackett and Bruce Tucker graduating in June.
“Ron and I knew that if we won that year (2010) with mainly freshmen and sophomores, we were going to win it a long time,” Cox said of the Cougars” second CMC championship with an underclassmen-dominated squad.
