Art Blake’s legacy as coach, mentor affirmed with induction into National Wrestling Hall of Fame

ANNAPOLIS — Art Blake, a teacher for 38 years in Kent County’s public schools and coach of many sports at both the youth and high school levels, is remembered as a hall of famer on and off the playing fields.

That reputation was solidified last month when Blake, who passed away in March at the age of 75, was inducted posthumously into the Maryland chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame for lifetime service to the sport.

Western Maryland College (now McDaniel), where he was a football-wrestling-baseball triple threat and the first-ever athlete to captain three sports in one year, alma mater Hackettstown High School in New Jersey and Maryland Modified Softball previously had welcomed Blake into their halls of fame for his accomplishments as an athlete.

He’d also already been enshrined as a coach in the halls of fame of Kent County High School and the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association.

On Nov. 10 at The Graduate Hotel in Annapolis, one of the highest honors in the sport of wrestling was bestowed upon Art Blake.

Ginny, his wife of 51 years, their sons Davey and Mikey and their families, KCHS wrestling alumni and lots of friends were there to celebrate a remarkable legacy.

Art Blake easily met the hall of fame criteria for induction for lifetime service to wrestling: integrity; at least 20 years of service to the sport; and a commitment to the community and the youth in it.

In the fine print, commitment was defined as “dedication to the development of leadership and citizenship in young people through the sport of wrestling.”

The Blake brothers, Gordon Boyer, Andy Jones, Artie Kaehler, Brian Kirby, Joey Vansant, Bryan Williams, Donnie Yerkie and Chris Yiannakis — members of the KCHS wrestling fraternity who have given back to the sport as coaches and contributors — showed up for their mentor at the hall of fame ceremony. They credit Art Blake with teaching them life skills such as intensity, focus, discipline, goal setting, determination and perseverance, in addition to the intricacies of a takedown, ankle pick, fireman’s carry, wrist control, cradle and pinning combination.

During Art Blake’s seven years as an assistant to KCHS head coach Dan Zottarelli, a 2002 National Wrestling Hall of Fame inductee, the Trojans had a tremendous championship run. Davey Blake, Mikey Blake, Brian Fox, Jacob Kirwan, Trey Kohl, Willie Leonard and Yerkie collectively won 13 state titles and Boyer was a state runner-up.

Yerkie, Yiannakis, Kirwan and Kaehler, who also was a state place-finisher during coach Blake’s tenure at KCHS, have taken the lead in re-establishing a highly successful youth wrestling program that is drawing boys and girls from Kent County and beyond.

Davey Blake coached for 15 years at alma mater McDaniel. For the last four years he has been the head girls wrestling coach at Francis Scott Key High School, where he is department chair for special education. Son JoJo, 6 years old and tipping the scales at 38 pounds, is in his second year wrestling for the Warriors youth program in Carroll County.

Mikey Blake, also a former wrestler at McDaniel College, now lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania. He is an assistant coach at Southwestern High School, where son Parker, a sophomore, is a varsity wrestler.

At last month’s National Wrestling Hall of Fame induction, Mikey Blake escorted his mother Ginny in the Green Jacket Parade that opened the ceremony. Yerkie, the inaugural recipient of the organization’s Medal of Courage in 2001, led off the parade.

Davey Blake spoke for the family.

He thanked event organizers and the hall of fame selection committee for the honor bestowed upon his father. Special thanks was given to Dicky Schmertzler, a former teammate and longtime friend of Art Blake, and Dan Zottarelli, who coached with Art Blake in the junior league and at KCHS for about 30 years.

Looking at photographs and newspaper clippings as he prepared for the event, Davey Blake acknowledged that “it hasn’t been easy. … It’s still a little bit fresh,” he said, of his father’s passing.

Printed here is the complete text of Davey Blake’s remarks.

My father loved the sport of wrestling. He loved the combative nature of the sport. He loved the grittiness and toughness needed to succeed. He loved that more often than not, you got what you earned. He also loved how humbling the sport was. He appreciated and understood that even when you do all the right things, work as hard and as smart as you can, that sometimes and on some days there was just someone who may have been better than you.

When his coaching days were over, he was still in the gym almost every weekend watching wrestling during the season. When I started coaching at McDaniel, he, along with a couple of his old college teammates, traveled to nearly every event we wrestled in for the 15 years I was there. He traveled with us out to Las Vegas. He went with us out to Iowa twice for the national duals. He went to NCAA championship events. He would spend three days with us at the Virginia Duals. He even drove a team van to Florida for us.

He just loved the sport, the type of young men and women that make up the teams, and being around the wrestling environment.

My father was a tremendous coach. I think this is proven both in the empirical data on how successful his athletes were as well as in the anecdotal data that you can gather by talking to anyone that was coached by him. He was a great teacher and communicator. He commanded your attention. He knew how to run a practice. He kept things fun for everyone.

All of the cliché qualities we know are necessary as a coach, he possessed.

However, this is not what made him stand out.

What made my father stand out was his ability to see and bring out your best qualities. What made my father stand out was his ability to find and create opportunities for his wrestlers to continuously improve. What made my father stand out was the genuine love and care he had for the kids he coached.

I will give you a couple of examples of what I mean.

1. Art could bring out the best in you. He was able to understand what buttons to push in order to get you to perform. He was a yeller. Anyone that has ever been in the gym with him knows you can hear him above all others.

But as much as he would yell, he would also whisper in your ear what you needed to hear to be your best. He was always confident in you, which also made you confident in yourself. He was very positive in his feedback, but he was also brutally honest.

I tell this story often, but the most influential thing he ever said to me was after I lost in the state championship match as a freshman in high school. We were walking out of the gym and I was looking down at my plaque. I was thinking “31-1, second in the state as a freshman. Not too bad.” Now I don’t know if this was a coincidence or his intuition, but in that moment he stopped me, looked at me, and asked, “Do you think you wrestled your best tonight? I don’t think you did and I know you can be better.”

Now, that sounds kind of harsh. But those comments were truthful and are what propelled me to be better.

He knew what button he could push with me, the correct way to challenge me, and then was able to guide and support me in the work to be better.

2. Art created opportunities for us to be successful. As kids, we spent nearly every weekend in Pennsylvania and New Jersey at tournaments wrestling some of the best youth competition the country had to offer. He orchestrated the combination of our Kent County youth program with Smyrna’s youth wrestling program. The wrestlers that came out of this group helped propel Smyrna High School into a premier Delaware program and set the stage for the Kent County High teams that dominated the Eastern Shore for two decades and to one of the top programs in the state from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s.

When the Parks and Recreation in Kent County decided to eliminate the junior league wrestling program, my father, along with the other fathers of the youth wrestlers, built a wrestling room in our backyard. It’s there we were able to offer a 24/7 training site that attracted coaches and wrestlers from the youth level to the collegiate ranks.

Even when my brother and I were in college, we would come back and there would be a wrestling practice happening.

And much like he did with the Smyrna group, he joined forces with the Cecil County Predators and brought his crew there to train.

He brought us to open mats. He sent us to camps. He ordered and watched technique videos. He found mentors and idols for us to watch and emulate. He was willing to go the extra mile for his wrestlers, and in turn, his wrestlers were loyal to him and performed at very high levels.

3. Art genuinely loved and cared for people. As rough and tough as he was, he genuinely loved and cared for people. Especially the kids and families of those he coached. But also for the people he came in contact with through the sport of wrestling.

He cared about your successes, in wrestling but also in life. He cared about what you were studying. He cared about what job or career you had going. He cared about how your family was doing. He would always ask the questions that would get you to open up.

More than anything, more than wins and losses or accolades, he was thankful for the opportunity to be in contact with so many good people and for our family to be blessed to be around and supported by so many good people. Being blessed to be around the people we were allowed us to develop our talents and shaped us into the people we are today.

And I know for certain he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did if it were not for my mother. She rode shotgun on every one of those wrestling trips, packed the snacks, did the budgeting, and probably did all of the tasks that he wasn’t capable of. She was just as big a part of providing that opportunity for all of us.

More than anything he loved the guys that he coached. To see the junior league wrestling program in Kent County go away for so many years was very difficult for him. The fact that the boys he coached are now the men that resurrected that program made him very proud. He was happy to see that they were now having an influence and impact by living in service to the community and hopefully creating some more champions and championships along the way.