Kootenai Klassic: It's so much more than just a wrestling event

The first thing to know about Montana is there are not many people around — about 1 million in 150,000-square miles — so, social events, particularly ones involving people you have not seen every week of your life, are rare.

Opportunities such as these garner serious cultural clout, regardless of calling-card pretense. Events attract an audience for certain reasons, but the big scenes are also an elusive opportunity to see and be seen.

Take the Kootenai Klassic, for example. The Little Guy Wrestling Tournament’s brochure pegs the deal to kids as “a quality experience and a chance to have some fun while gaining mat time.” This is true, but there is so much more. Walking into Libby High School’s gymnasium Saturday morning, a menagerie of bedazzled outfits—glistening jean pockets gasping for air, eye-catching blouses, glistening purses, blinding earrings — overload a man’s senses. A deep, dry voice — Sam Elliott? — booms over the omnipresent loudspeaker like a bingo caller, announcing new matches for more than 700 kids.

Take a step toward the eight blue mats, up to the yellow rope laced around the competitive rectangle, and marvel at the coaches’ vein-in-the-neck-bulging intensity. These are the new dads who wear Affliction T-shirts at your local Buffalo Wild Wings when Ultimate Fighting Championship contests are on pay-per-view. Here, their muscles abuse too-small short-sleeve shirts paired with matching hats ordered online with solid colors and generic logos, the kinds worn by fundraiser-supporting parents around the country.

The stands are packed, even the pullout bleachers in the upper section only occupied by wandering pre-teens during high school basketball games. Parents, siblings, grandparents and generally interested spectators shuffle around. At times, when several children with sizeable support groups compete at once, the gym floor, seen from above, looks like a Jackson Pollock piece in kaleidoscopic motion — design-your-own shirt capitalism painting a profitable picture.

Vic Crace, president of Libby Wrestling Club, oversaw the event.

“Darlene Hammons had her seat to watch her great-grandson,” Crace said. “She has been to every Montana High School wrestling final since 1982. I hope that me and (his wife) Sarah can do that. Brady Fiscus coached Beginners and Novices. He was a state runner-up in 1998.”

Blair Brooks, a Thompson Falls mother of two, took the more relaxed sartorial approach with a solid blue team sweater.

“We come every year,” Brooks said of the event for children not yet in high school, some as young as four years old. Her sons, Peyton Whitling, 9, and Roman Sparks, 10, were both wrestling at 75 pounds and coached by their father, Kevin Sparks, himself a former Air Force grappler. Competitions such as these have already taken the family to Idaho and Salt Lake City this year.

“In Montana, you do not get a lot of social events,” Brooks said. “At some of these things there are lots of women decked out in six-inch heels. I don’t know how they do it.”

Looking past the giggling gaggles of teenage girls walking laps around the mats, a different path is apparent. Her name is Savannah Rickter. At eight years old, Rickter stepped to the day’s second match with no room to spare. At 0-1, she faced an early exit with another loss. But Rickter, her mother Kristie Rickter watching, comes out firing.

“She’s relentless against her older brother at home,” Kristie Rickter said. “She just loves this.”

Rickter controlled each one-minute round and won her second match on points, 12-3. Savannah runs to her mother in celebration after a high school student working as a referee raises her hand. The boy Rickter just whipped starts crying and his father showers him with a litany of aphorisms and platitudes, a common chorus during the day.

One father who takes those lessons as serious as a half-nelson is Eureka Coach James Schmidt. The father of three wrestlers and a former Army Captain learned the meaning of hard work as a young man on the mat.

“With me, it was one of those things that showed if you try hard, you can succeed,” Schmidt said. “I learned I could do that with anything in life.”

Like his father, Rod Schmidt, before him, James bonds with his sons through wrestling.

“It’s how we connect,” James Schmidt said. “My dad and I have a great relationship today, and I think a lot of that is from wrestling. Community is bigger than your town, so it is nice for my sons to develop friendships with kids they see at summer camps in Kalispell, Whitefish, Columbia Falls.”

Standing behind a mix of grandparents hoisting iPads on record, Matt Martin, a Columbia Falls coach, stands with his son, Cody, 12.

“We got here at 10 a.m., but most of the coaches got here at 7:30 a.m.,” Matt Martin said. “I wrestled for five years and Cody started three years ago. It’s a good family sport. It teaches self-motivation, because it’s both a team and individual sport.”

As the novice bracket—ages nine and 10—completes competition, there is a rare down moment. Garret Chapel, Troy High School junior and recently-crowned state champ at 170 pounds, playfully tosses a kid half his age to the floor. Fellow Greenchain grappler Zach Crace jumps in the mix. Smiles illuminate the floor and the flowing tears, and the spittle-inducing instructions and the passive-aggressive bumping for photo space stop. For a moment, the kids are simply having fun.