JEROMESVILLE – Call it a rebuild, call it a reset, call it a reconstruction – whatever category it gets filed under, just don’t call Dan Mager a rookie of remodels.
An area veteran in the football and wrestling coaching domain, Mager has returned to steer the Hillsdale varsity wrestling program for the second time.
He’s become well-known locally for his ability to rehab programs over the last two decades, showing a one-of-a-kind knack for quickly boosting participation.
Fixing the Falcons was going to be no small task one year after the team featured just three wrestlers and didn’t score a single point on the mat at the Wayne County Athletic League Championships.
“We recruited hard over the summer and into the fall and we feel pretty good about the numbers,” said Mager, who also led HHS for two seasons starting in 2013 when it saw participation beginning to dwindle. “I’d meet guys in the parking lot, catch them after track practice, after baseball practice.”
“You have to go after kids and once you get them, you’ve got to retain them,” he said. “And how do you do that? You’ve got to give the kid at the bottom as much attention as the guy at the top.
“You have to convince them why (wrestling) is a good thing to do.”
Including both the middle school and high school programs, numbers have more than quadrupled from seven last year to 32 this winter.
There is a tried-and-true process for Mager, a 1983 Ashland High School graduate and former Marine.
He coached middle school wrestling and football for the Arrows beginning in 1997 before taking the reins of the Hillsdale Middle School wrestling program in the mid-2000s when there were discussions of canceling it.
He then took over the Falcon varsity in 2013 from longtime head coach Mike Mack and more than doubled the number of grapplers on the team in his first year.
The only thing that pried Mager from Hillsdale was an opportunity for a rebuild of the Crestview football program in 2015 – his first chance as a varsity football head coach. He led the Cougars for four seasons, including a pair of 7-3 finishes and a 22-18 overall record.
Crestview was 2-8 in two of the three seasons before he arrived. During his tenure, the roster more than doubled from 41 to 85 and the Cougars were a combined 15-6 in the Firelands Conference his last three years.
“I’m glad I went to Crestview and I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Mager said, “but I also left something (with Hillsdale wrestling) that I thought was on the verge of being really good.”
With roughly two hours of daily travel to practice and a tough work-coach-life balance, Mager decided to step away from the Cougars and coaching following the 2018 season. It was an emotional decision for a guy who in many ways had helped unite the Crestview community in his time there.
Friday nights under Mager at CHS become more like events, with fireworks after touchdowns and victories, and different pre-game salutes to law enforcement, first responders and military veterans.
Now five years later, he is retired, has a second grandchild on the way and said that after seeing no one apply for the Hillsdale wrestling job, he couldn’t watch it slowly fade away.
There have been four coaches for the Falcons since he last led them in 2015, and Mager feels confident he can restore the rise of the program. A few years removed from also suffering a heart attack, he takes a more relaxed approach now.
“Some programs are folding, and I didn’t want that to happen,” he said. “Being retired now, there wasn’t an excuse; time’s not a factor anymore necessarily.
“I used to be very structured in practice by Week 2, Week 3,” he added. “Now I’m throwing that all out the window and we’re literally adjusting on the fly based on what we think our kids are learning, absorbing.
“If we don’t think they’re absorbing quite quick enough, we’ll go back a week.”
The “we” in that statement is a knowledge-packed “we.” As assistant coaches at his side, Mager has two of the Ashland area’s best wrestling minds in former Ashland High School wrestling head coaches Gary Weisenstein and Jim Visintine.
Weisenstein was one of the most successful coaches in the history of the AHS program, winning six league titles and guiding 11 different state qualifiers in a 10-year tenure that ended in 2006.
He became a wrestling official for a decade after that.
Visintine, meanwhile, followed Weisenstein as head coach for two seasons. He has spent another quarter-century of his life as an assistant coach in some capacity for both the Ashland and Hillsdale programs.
“You’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with,” Mager said, “so when I got the job, the first two that came to my mind was those two guys, and I knew neither one of them was really coaching at the time, so I thought I’d call them. And here we are.”
The Falcons also have JJ Griffith leading their junior high school team and Cody Myers guiding the youth program.
As for the varsity, Mager said he has nearly 10 athletes who have never wrestled before, and his only returners are sophomores Garrett Furr and Landon Thomas.
Lauryn Davis, who established herself as one of the best female wrestlers around, graduated after finishing 17-6 and winning a match at the girls state tournament last season.
“You can get as technical as you want and as cutting-edge as you want, but it really comes down to some of the basics,” Mager said. “Just be in really good shape, wrestle tough and have the mindset to put the effort in to get the results.”
Furr was 8-22 at heavyweight last season and said this year will largely be about establishing team unity and building depth.
That is definitely the best place to start.
The Falcons have finished last in the WCAL Championships in three of the last four seasons. They haven’t had a first-round win in the boys district tournament since 2015, Mager’s previous season leading the team.
That win came from Mager’s son, Corbin Mager, who the coach thinks was also the last Falcon to win a WCAL weight-class title.
Hillsdale’s last boys state qualifier also came under coach Mager, when Jett Heldenbrand made it to Columbus in 2014 at 120 pounds.
It might take some time to get things back to that level, but Mager feels he has a pair of juniors in Lincoln Jones (157 pounds) and Ethan Miller (144) who could help lead by example.
Both are football players who wrestled in the past before losing passion for the sport, but they feel things have changed this season.
“Once these coaches came, I felt that spark again and it was definitely something I wanted to be a part of,” Miller said. “I do it to win, but at the end of the day I’m doing it because it’s something I love to do.
“I’m more so a team-first guy, and anything else I can get out of it for myself I’m definitely taking advantage of that.”
Added Jones, “This year, more people have joined and we’re able to show them that wrestling can be fun and that it’s an exciting thing; it doesn’t have to be like a job.”
“I really feel like we could be part of a rebirth of the program,” he added. “… This (coaching staff) really feels like it’s the start of something fresh and new. It feels like everybody’s enthusiastic about it.”
Mager said building a pipeline to wrestling from the football team with some help from Hillsdale football coach Trevor Cline has been a critical component to the rebuild.
With so much newness, he said one of the most exciting aspects of the job will be watching just how much his squad can improve over time.
“I’ve got to make it successful in their minds,” Mager said. “Regardless of wins and losses, did they learn anything, did they enjoy the process, did they enjoy the experience? It’s tough to do that in wrestling where you’ve got to work them hard.”
“We talked a lot about it coming in that this could be new for all of us, taking over a varsity program where you have eight or nine kids who have never wrestled before,” he said. “That’s really tough, but we’re taking it slowly, methodically.”