At Toppenish, they wrestle. The 2A school is aiming for its third state title in four years

Just above the entrance to the Toppenish High School wrestling room hangs a sign, revered by all who compete on the mat, that simply reads “State Champions.”

That is always the goal, says 15th-year coach Johnny Cerna, who also wrestled for his alma mater under his father, John.

“Those kids wrestle for (Cerna),” Orting coach Jody Coleman said. “But they also wrestle for their community. Those kids will do anything that is asked of them.”

The Wildcats are primed to claim their third Class 2A title in four seasons Saturday night at Mat Classic XXXI in the Tacoma Dome. And many coaches around the state consider them the best program in the tournament, regardless of classification.

They are the only school in the state with two wrestlers selected to The News Tribune’s 2019 class of “Untouchables” — junior Haiden Drury at 126 pounds, and senior Andres Aguilera at 170.

“We’ve had state champions before. My dad coached a few of them, and I even won a team title (as a wrestler in 1998),” Cerna said. “But, to be in the hunt every year like we’ve been the past four to five years, this is probably the best era of wrestling we’ve had in a long time.”

Toppenish hasn’t reinvented the wheel when it comes to building the state’s next powerhouse program.

It has become the favorite sport at the high school, evidenced by the 55 boys and girls who turned out for wrestling this season. And they are good, too — 22 (18 boys, four girls) of them are wrestling for titles this weekend.

The town’s biggest freestyle club — Team Demolition — is as healthy as it has been with savvy instruction and bigger participation numbers. As a result, a pipeline of talent runs directly to the high school.

What Cerna has done that few others in Eastern Washington are willing to do is encourage his combatants to go wherever they can to find the best competition.

Even if that means long drives from the town just outside Yakima over to the Seattle-Tacoma area.

“You have to take the steps necessary to be successful, even if that means going to places not close to home to train,” Aguilera said. “Of course, it is out of the way. But, I feel it is necessary to better myself. And once I thought about it in that way, I was like, ‘OK, it is a couple hours here, and a couple hours there to be better in the long run.’ ”

Drury is the one wrestler in Toppenish many feel has the biggest upside to do things at a national — or even international — level in wrestling.

Like Aguilera, Drury has been coming to the west side for weeks at a time in the summer to train with other state-championship wrestlers, including Curtis’ Aizayah “Maka” Yacapin, White River’s Gabriel Hawthorne and Bonney Lake’s Yusief Lillie and Brenden Chaowanapibool.

“We are all about the same size, so we constantly train for the big tournaments,” Drury said.

Drury has struck a strong friendship with Yacapin, who is also trying to win a second Mat Classic title this weekend.

“We became good friends over freshman year (in 2016), and it took off from there,” Drury said. “We are really close now. We text each other about everything.

“I mean, it is still tough wrestling your friends, but since we have different body types — I am more long and lanky, and he is short and stocky — we also have different wrestling styles. It just makes training that much more difficult.”

Drury’s out-of-town investment began paying off last summer. Not only did he win three state freestyle and Greco-Roman titles (to go along with his first Mat Classic triumph last February), he did something no Toppenish wrestler has ever done.

In July, he dominated the 120-pound bracket in the Cadet Greco-Roman tournament in Fargo, N.D., to win his first national championship.

“I feel like (winning nationals) has given me a lot of confidence going into different stuff now,” Drury said. “It is a great thing to have on the resume.”

Or as Coleman plainly stated, “he is next-level now.”

That level of success is surely going to motivate others from Toppenish to follow the paths of Aguilera and Drury.

“How I’ve grown with experience — I don’t want to suffocate my kids or hold them down. I know what the limits of our wrestling room are,” Cerna said. “If parents want to put in the time and pay the money, those kids should be able to travel where they want to.”

This story was originally published February 15, 2019 at 8:25 AM.