Just the beginning

Sidney Wheeler does not plan to settle for what he has. He wants more.

The 182-pound Catamount recorded his first individual state championship on Saturday at the Gwinnett Center in Duluth and became only the third in Dalton wrestling history to win a state title as a sophomore. But while Wheeler was reflecting on his run, he also was looking forward to his final two years of high school and what is still left to accomplish. Wheeler expects to continue to bring home state championships for Dalton.

He has a three-peat in sight, and his coaches believe he can accomplish it.

“It either will happen, or he’ll die trying,” Dalton coach Richard Garrett said jokingly. “But there’s really no reason why not. ... The possibilities are there.”

Wheeler will have plenty of support.

“A phenominal and special athlete could come along or there could be injuries,” said assistant coach Brian Harrison, who captured a state championship in 1999 in the 189-pound class. “There’s things that can happen that can cause him not to (win another title), but barring injury and anything else, I don’t see a reason why Sidney couldn’t win three.”

Wheeler is a bit more confident about the possibility.

“It’s going to happen,” he said.

Comeback championship

Garrett said Wheeler’s rise over each postseason hurdle placed before him could have been seen as a surprise to the rest of the state. In a region that features powerhouse programs at Heritage-Catoosa and Gilmer, two teams which finished 1-2 in the traditional tournament and flipped in the dual championships, Wheeler was overshadowed until he won the area traditional championship. Then came a state title run that few saw coming.

But now that he has done it once, anything is possible.

“He peaked at the right time,” Garrett said. “He wrestled three very good tournaments.”

An Area 7-3A championship was capped off two weeks ago with a victory against Allatoona’s Cody Webb. Then, Wheeler moved through the Class 3A West sectionals and finished in second place. His state tournament run came one week later and ended in jubilation with a win against West Lauren’s Demetrius Green in the finals.

But the climactic victory did not come without the maximum amount of suspense. Wheeler was losing 9-3 in the second period but pulled off a run which included scoring 15 of the next 18 points in winning 18-12.

“If I had just gone out there and pinned him it would not have been as exciting,” Wheeler said.

His mom, Selina Hall, would’ve been okay with that.

“It would’ve been better on mom’s nerves,” she said. “My mind went back to his childhood and just amazed at where we were. In my mind, I thought I must have done something right as a mother.”

Hall said she already found peace with God through prayer, and the win was an added plus.

“I didn’t ask for Sidney to win,” she said. “I only asked God to take care of him. And the win was a bonus.”

Road to the ‘hardest one’

While the finals victory was thrilling, Wheeler points to the quarterfinals and semifinals matches of the state tournament as the turning point. Wheeler faced Webb and was trailing by “three or four points” when he scored a third-period pinfall on his opponent. Webb is the same person Wheeler pinned to win the area championship two weeks ago.

“I did a no-wrist Peterson on (Webb) and got the pin with only a few seconds to go,” Wheeler said, noting a Peterson move is when one wrestler starts on the bottom and reverses his opponent, who is on top, onto their back for a potential pin. “After that match, I started wrestling better. The first couple of matches I didn’t wrestle well because of jitters with being at state.”

In the semifinals, Wheeler defeated Locust Grove’s Joseph Farrell 7-4 after putting Farrell on his back twice for near falls.

“After he won (the quarterfinals) and won the semifinals match later that evening, I told him, ‘That semifinals match was your best match all weekend,’” Harrison said. “And I think it made him realize that it was possible, and he could do something really special.”

Harrison called Wheeler’s first championship victory, “the hardest one,” because it was his first trip to state and the atmosphere was new to him.

“He doesn’t know what to expect,” Harrison said. “He doesn’t know what the crowd is like. He’s got nerves and now that he has that out of the way, he knows what to expect and it comes easier.”

The coach also looks at the championship from the team perspective. Garrett, who coached Dalton wrestling up to 2004 before he stepped down, returned halfway through this season after Charles Mitchell resigned to accept an administrative position at Hixson High School in Tennessee. A number of wrestlers quit the team, but Garrett stayed positive and now looks to the future of Catamount wrestling.

“It gets us back on track,” Garrett said. “Not just with Sidney, but with the whole team. Winning state like that is kind of contagious. If you get started then you’ll have them all believing they can do it.”

The hunted and the hunter

As Wheeler jokingly reminded Garrett, he left in 2004 after a state championship and came back to one. Wheeler’s victory was the first wrestling state championship for Dalton since 2004 when Kyle Harrison, Bryan’s brother, won in the 215-pound class.

There are a couple of similarities between the two. Harrison won it in 2002 as a sophomore, same as Wheeler. Harrison then won twice more to become Dalton’s only three-time champ.

Wheeler wants to be the second, and Brian Harrison said Wheeler cannot settle on one state title; he has to keep getting better. That means training harder in the summer, more wrestling in the off-season and more conditioning.

What Wheeler thrives at is his conditioning. He trains at a gymnasium in Chattanooga called Blalock’s IMB.

“Conditioning is what he does well,” Daryle Wheeler, Sidney’s father, said. “He does not get tired.”

While Sidney Wheeler is keeping a hunter-like mentality, things are already a little different. He said being a state champion is like having “a new title” to his name.

“A lot of people are looking at me different,” he said. “A lot more people have more respect.”

He will go into his junior year also as the hunted. He will be a defending state champion and must defend his crown. According to Brian Harrison, who also won his state title as a sophomore, a defending state champion “cannot have a bad day” because someone is always waiting to unseat the king.

“You can’t come to a practice or a match and say, ‘Man, I don’t feel like it today,’ because there’s always somebody out there trying to knock you off your perch,” he said. “When you’re on top, everybody wants to be where you are. So every time you wrestle, (your opponent) will bring his best. You are the measuring stick for them in their class.”

Sidney Wheeler is not bothered by that. In fact, he relishes it.

“Now you don’t have to go find matches,” he said. “People want to wrestle you.”

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