After 50 years coaching wrestling at Yelm High School, Gaylord Strand retiring
In Gaylord Strand’s early days working at Yelm High School, the town had a single stoplight. He remembers seeing a horse tied up outside the local bar on his drive home from working football games on Friday nights.
Times have changed.
Yelm has blown up with housing development in recent years, rows of houses supplanting former farmland in the booming east Thurston County town. Strand, who has been the wrestling coach at Yelm High School for 50 years, has seen the community grow in that time. He never imagined Yelm would one day be in the state’s 4A classification, reserved for the largest high schools in Washington state.
On Tuesday, he coached his final home wrestling match, an emotional milestone in a teaching and coaching career that has spanned five decades.
“I’ve been having so much fun,” Strand said from his office before Tuesday night’s festivities. “I still have a great enthusiasm for coaching and seeing these kids benefit from the program. I’m going to miss it.”
Strand, 71, decided it’s time to step down and call it a career. He hopes to spend more time tending to his wife, Sarah, who he calls his “biggest fan.”
Strand grew up in Woodburn, Oregon, a city between Portland and Salem. He wrestled in high school and by his senior year, took fourth place in the state tournament, which turned into a scholarship at Seattle Pacific University. After graduating from Woodburn High School in 1970, Strand kept improving at Division II Seattle Pacific, where he went on to compete in nationals collegiately.
After interviewing for several teaching positions after his fourth year at Seattle Pacific and not landing a job, Strand was preparing to study a fifth year at the University of Washington. Then his wrestling coach called him and told him the Yelm superintendent was looking for someone who could coach PE, Science and coach wrestling. His first reaction: what and where is Yelm?
“I’ve never even heard of Yelm,” he told his coach.
He interviewed shortly thereafter and left his interview with a signed contract, thinking it’d be a good place to start his career in 1974 before moving onto bigger and better things. In the end, he never left.
“The families, the parents,” Strand said kept him at Yelm. “The longer you stayed here, pretty soon you start coaching their kids. You’ve got continuity from the kids I had in my program, wanting to get the same values.”
He’s even coached some grandchildren of some former student-athletes. It has been a lifelong calling.
“A lot of these kids come from single (parent) families and they really need that,” he said, choking up. “I don’t know how many times it’s paid benefits to me to hear kids say, ‘Thank you for what you did. It helped me, it made me who I am.’”
Strand has always liked to keep things light. He’s known as an expert prank artist. Perhaps the most memorable, though, was a prank he fell victim to.
In the old days, with the all the farmland surrounding the high school, it wasn’t unusual for unpleasant smells to drift in through the air conditioning system. On a warm spring day, Strand was wearing shorts and sat down to work at his desk, not overthinking the funky smell he encountered.
“Then I felt something moist touching my leg,” he said. “I look down underneath the chair and there was this pig. Someone had put this pig in my room and it had (crapped) all over itself underneath my desk.”
Strand has coached 134 state placing wrestlers, 19 state champions, 12 academic state champions, a team state title in 2010, was inducted into the Washington State Wrestling Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2009 and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma in 2017. He also coached track and field at Yelm for over 40 years.
“I had the greatest job in the world,” he said. “It was exactly what I wanted to do.”
This story was originally published January 24, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
