View from the Sidelines

Once a champion, always a champion.

When you win a state high school wrestling championship in Montana, it isn’t just for that moment or season or year, it is forever.

In a way, you become a grappling immortal, a champion not for just right now, but for always.

It’s an accomplishment that can never be taken away from you once that first place MHSA medal is placed around your neck, up there on the podium, in the biggest wrestling event of any season in Montana. And that sense of accomplishment, that feeling of realizing your fondest dream while in the waking world will be able to be recalled at will from this day forward.

“Once you win that state title, no one can ever take it away, it is yours forever,” Hawk coach Mike Thilmony agreed. “It’s an accomplishment that you can savor for the rest of your life.”

Thilmony was more than glad to help guide his son Trae to the State B-C title at 120 pounds last week, making him only the latest Hawk wrestler to earn his wings as one of the greatest Falls wrestlers ever.

The 16 Thompson Falls wrestlers who have won 17 individual State B-C titles since TFHS began the wrestling program back in the late 1960s are now considered wrestling gods of sorts, the Blue Hawk immortals, if you will.

That list of champions, of Blue Hawk wrestling immortals, freshly revised just this week, reads like this:

1974 – Rod Bybee, 138 pounds.

1975 – Rod Bybee, 145.

1977 – Don Breitenbach, 112; Chris Wollaston, 155.

1979 – Ron Kazmierczak, 126; Steve Davis, 155; Larry Milner, 167; Shawn Allen, HWT.

1980 – Mike Fisher, 132.

1982 – Mike LaBrosse, 126.

1987 – Jared Savik, 167.

1991 – Jesse Kegel, 145.

1996 – Randi Cunningham, 171.

2000 – Jay Deal, 189.

2012 – Ben Conover, 145.

2018 – Kaleb Frank, 120.

2020 – Trae Thilmony, 120.

***

Trae Thilmony can’t wait to give his speech to the Thompson Falls Little Guys next Monday night at practice.

“It’s a tradition we started back when Ben Conover won his state title in 2012,” Mike Thilmony, the Blue Hawk head wrestling coach who also guides the local youth program, said. “We had him, as a freshly crowned State B-C champion, come in and talk to our Little Guys, about what it was like, and about all the hard work required to enjoy success like that.

“Then we continued it when Kaleb (Frank) won his championship in 2018,” he added. “It was very well received, all the kids really loved it and, I guess it made an impression on Trae, because he asked me about it on the bus ride home from Billings, saying he was ready to do his turn at it now.”

Once one of the eager Little Guy grapplers looking up to those champions only a few years ago, Trae has already grown to be a man among men in the world of high school wrestling. He took to heart the lessons Conover and Frank were teaching, and is becoming the teacher himself now.

Only a sophomore but already a team leader for the Hawks, Trae obviously bought in on what his father and his visiting champions were selling about wrestling over the years, and hopes the Thompson Falls Little Guys buy in on what he has to say to them next Monday afternoon.

Choose your words carefully young man because there could be someone just like you a few years ago in that crowd of young wrestlers, trying to live up to the example you just set.