West Coach Wrestles With Success : Kent Wyatt has guided teams successfully for 20 years while other South Bay school programs have fallen on lean times.

The more things change in South Bay wrestling programs, the more things remain the same with the West Torrance High program.

Faced with declining enrollment and demographic changes, budget cuts and smaller wrestlers, West Coach Kent Wyatt has survived and even prospered when, all around, others in the area have fallen on lean times.

Wyatt’s program has been at or near the top since he began coaching at West 20 years ago. And after this year’s success, it looks as if he might be starting another winning decade.

West is ranked No. 1 in the CIF Southern Section 3-A Division coaches poll, is unbeaten in the Ocean League and has a 15-1 dual-meet record. Wyatt won his 200th career dual meet last week against North Torrance.

“This started out to be a rebuilding year,” he said, “but it has turned out to be a pleasant surprise.”

The Changes

At West, there has been a dramatic shift away from a predominantly white enrollment to about 48% Asian. The Asian wrestlers are smaller, which helps fill the lighter weight divisions but makes it hard to fill the heavier divisions, especially when there are fewer kids in school.

“It’s harder to get the Asian kids out for athletics,” Wyatt said, “because they are so academically oriented.”

Enrollment has dropped from 3,000 students in the late ‘60s to 1,560 this year. Since the early 1980s, three South Bay high schools (Aviation, Lennox and Lawndale) have closed.

When Wyatt came to West in 1971, there were 11 physical education teachers. Now there are three. Wyatt once received $1,800 a year from the district for his wrestling budget. Now he gets $450.

It all adds up to tough times.

“The fight for dollars is tough. And you don’t get the kind of support in some schools that you used to see,” said Jack Fernandez, who coached 27 years at Mira Costa High before retiring in 1983.

The Success

Wyatt remains unchanged in his commitment to achieving excellence with a wrestling team despite being the only full-time, on-campus wrestling coach.

At 43, he is best described as a self-effacing beach lover with thin, sun-bleached hair--the result of regular surfing. He teaches four physical education classes, coaches at West three hours a day, is an assistant wrestling coach at El Camino College and still finds time during the week to run between 30 and 50 miles in addition to surfing.

His wrestling teams haven’t been shortchanged, though. They have been outstanding.

Every year, except for two, Wyatt has had a wrestler place in the Southern Section Masters Meet, from which the top six finishers qualify for the state meet. But he has never had a state champion.

“If, as a coach, the state meet was my only goal, I’d be a real frustrated coach,” he said.

The Coach

You don’t have to look much further than Wyatt when looking for reasons to explain success at West.

“If you have a good coach, you’ll have a good program,” Fernandez said.

Wyatt was an outstanding wrestler at Mira Costa for Fernandez. He was a 145-pound Southern Section champion as a senior in 1964 and was also the school’s Outstanding Athlete that year. He was a two-time junior college state champion in 1965 and 1966 at El Camino and won the NCAA Division II title in his senior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“He’s certainly one of our stars from Mira Costa,” Fernandez said. “One of our brightest. And you won’t find anyone more competitive than Kent.”

That keeps his teams competitive, too.

Wyatt says his fighting spirit was what motivated him to bring back to life a sagging wrestling program when it hit a lull in the early 1980s.

“It basically boils down to I hate losing,” he said. “I want my teams to win. It’s just not in my makeup to run through the motions and have a mediocre program.

“The power in the 1960s and 1970s (in high school wrestling) was in the South Bay,” Wyatt said.

In 1974, the top five teams in the Masters Meet were from the old Bay League: West, Mira Costa, North Torrance, Torrance and Redondo.

“But it got to the point where we weren’t competing at the CIF level,” Wyatt said.

Part of the solution was getting Asian athletes involved. Wyatt says when he first came to West, he had no Asians on the team. This year there are six on the varsity. The only senior on the team, Steve Lee, moved to Southern California five years ago from Taiwan.

“We don’t have the bigger kids we used to have in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Wyatt said. “It was hard when I first came here to fill the light weights. I had to wrestle sophomores at 98 pounds. Now it is a senior.”

It may be different shapes and sizes, but somehow Wyatt coaxes winners out of whatever athletes he can get to snap on headgear and get down in a four-point stance.

“He makes you feel like you can beat anybody in (all the) CIF,” said Lee, who took third at the 3-A Division finals last year and has compiled a 32-5 record this year.

Wyatt also uses guys like junior heavyweight Josh Gormley, who transferred in this year, and junior Scott Herman, whom Wyatt has known since Herman was in the second grade. Herman, 23-4 this season, was the league champion last season.

And Wyatt has gotten sterling performances from unlikely sources. Last weekend in a tournament at Morro Bay, junior Demian Botero made it to the finals, and junior Dan Chaney has placed in every tournament this year.

“He is very close to his kids,” Fernandez said of Wyatt. “The drive comes from a very supportive family. He still keeps his surfboard at his dad’s garage down on 17th Street in Manhattan Beach.

“In most cases, to be a good wrestler it takes cooperation from the whole family. It takes so much dedication and discipline you just can’t do it on your own.”

To Wyatt, his wrestlers are like family.

“I still wrestle with them (in practice) and I’m closer than any (other) coach because of it,” he said.

The Legacy

Although there has been no state champion, West has had its share of impressive teams and individuals through the years.

Wyatt’s first group of seniors in 1974 won the first, and only, CIF title of Wyatt’s coaching era. That team had four individual finalists and three were champions.

West went undefeated from the second match in 1973 until midway through the 1977 season, including a second-place finish in CIF and third in state in 1976, when two wrestlers were runners-up and another was third.

For Wyatt, 1976 was a big year--he was married. He has two daughters and two stepdaughters.

In 1979, West went undefeated again in duel meets and was third in the CIF finals.

The following years until 1986 were difficult, and Wyatt thought about quitting because he was burned out.

One of the only highlights Wyatt remembers from those years was in 1981 when West’s Greg Thornton took second in state. Thornton had broken his wrist five weeks before the meet.

But by 1986, Wyatt caught a second wind. The team tooks third in the 3-A Division and went undefeated in dual meets.

Last season, the Warriors repeated as league champs, went undefeated and took fourth in the 3-A Division finals. Senior Mike Ramirez successfully defended his CIF title.

The team has exceeded Wyatt’s expectations this year. But people at West have become used to that.