Tiger wrestling coach stepping down after 4 years

SUMMIT COUNTY — More often than not, a new coach comes into a new position with difficult challenges facing their program. Their team may have had a rough going of late, losing matches or having disciplinary problems.

When Jim Melvin took over the Summit High wrestling team before the 2004-05 season, sure he had some of those issues to deal with, but his main concern was simply making sure the program didn’t go away.

The season before he took over as the head coach, the Tiger wrestling team only
consisted of four athletes and was in jeopardy of being dissolved.

“I knew coming in that it was on thin ice,” Melvin said. “ ... I felt that I had to fight for the wrestling program. In a lot of people’s eyes, if there’s only six or seven kids doing it, then it’s a waste of time. ... What are those kids going to do it they don’t have wrestling? It’s something that they are passionate about.”

In his four years at the reins, Melvin helped to get the program onto more solid ground by doing everything from teaching his players wrestling techniques to driving the team bus.

But this season, Melvin won’t be behind the wheel. He won’t be hollering advice from off the mat — or at least, not as the head coach. About a month and a half ago, Melvin decided to have surgery on his left shoulder that had been bothering him for years. The lengthy and arduous task of rehabilitation won’t leave him the free time he needs to dedicate himself to the Tigers for another year.

“It was a really tough decision,” Melvin said. “I went back and forth on it, but the timing just seemed right. ... It was a great time. Hopefully, I was able to make a good impression on the kids and had a positive influence on them.”

The influence that Melvin had on the SHS wrestling program went much deeper than his four seasons as head coach.

His parents moved to Summit County when Melvin was two years old. He was a middle school wrestler and when it came time for him to choose between slopes and the mats as a freshman at Summit High, the choice for him was simple.

“I always had a lot of passion for (wrestling),” Melvin said. “ ... I was always an independent sport type of a guy.”

After graduating in 1984, Melvin began volunteering with the team. Then after about 15 seasons of “volunteering off and on,” Melvin said that he saw a trend in the program that he didn’t like.

“I saw such a high turnover rate with coaches,” he said. “I just thought, ‘Here I am, a stable, local guy. I should give it a shot.”

Melvin took a paid assistant coaching position in 1999.

In that same year, Melvin also started a youth wrestling program in Summit County,
geared towards kids in kindergarten all the way up to fifth grade.

“(Younger kids) are so fun to work with because they haven’t developed any strong habits by that age,” Melvin said. “They are very impressionable.”

Melvin ran the Little Tigers program for a number of years while also working with the high school.

Then in 2004, Melvin received the head coaching position at the high school.

He said that all he wanted to do was give everyone a reason why the wrestling program was important, why it deserved to stay on SHS’s slate of sports.

Well, that happened in his very first season. With 11 kids out for the team that year — a big improvement off the year before but still very small for a high school team —Melvin coached the Tigers to their first dual meet win in more than five seasons.

“The Summit numbers were so small in the past,” Melvin explained, “and if you don’t have enough kids to fill the weight classes, then you have to forfeit those matches ... That makes it hard to win.”

Their first win wasn’t the only highlight to Melvin’s first season. The Tigers also had a state qualifier for the first time in more than five years.

“With those two positive things, I thought that there wasn’t any way that they could kill the program after that,” Melvin said.

Now after his four years in the top spot, Melvin knows that he is going to miss all the different aspects of being the head coach.

“To see kids in competition doing some type of move that you taught them ... seeing those kids come together as a team in such an independent sport, it’s just great,” Melvin said.

Though Melvin won’t be the top Tiger any longer, he knows that he won’t be gone for good. The Town of Silverthorne employee knows that this is his home, this is where he belongs. So whether he gets back to coaching the Little Tigers or takes stats for the high school or even is driving the bus again, Melvin just wants to be around it all.

“I started coaching just because I loved it and was passionate about it,” he said. “It’s never about pay. I was just happy to be able to get enough money to get gas to come coach those kids. ... I would have done it for free if they wanted me to.”

Bryce Evans can be reached at (970) 668-4634 or at bevans@summitdaily.com.