Senior Sean Boyle is ranked eighth in the country in his weight class and was just named Southern Conference wrestler of the year. Senior Nick Soto will be seeking his fourth SoCon championship Saturday.
Yet Levi Clemons, who will be in Asheville, N.C., at the league tournament as a supporter/coach, may top them both in representing the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“If Sean or Nick is an All-American, Levi will still be our biggest success story,” coach Heath Eslinger said.
UTC is still seeking its first All-American — a tangible sign of growth and success — in the Eslinger area, so the coach’s remark was somewhat stunning.
“There’s no doubt that Levi embodies what this program is about — this year, anyway,” Eslinger said. “I think he would admit that he struggled to be completely consumed by what the program is about.”
Eslinger’s program is about total development from the practice room to the classroom to mature social responsibilities. At the root of each is his promotion of a family atmosphere.
“We have guys on the team that came here from other schools, and they say it’s 100 percent different at other schools — everybody more based on individual success and interests,” Clemons related. “Here I can name at least a dozen teammates that would drop what they were doing and come get me if, for example, my car broke down.”
It goes deeper than that. Much deeper. Clemons last semester made the dean’s list, and prior to that he spent the summer running, biking, lifting, training to reach personal goals.
That was the new Levi, the one embracing the Eslinger mindset.
“My first year I became a starter for about half the year. I didn’t have great grades that first semester, and Heath sat me down and said here are the things you have to do to be successful: Go to class, go to practice, get your grades and set a positive social example,” Clemons recalled. “My grades have gone up since, although up till this year I did what I needed to do to get by.”
After a summer stretched thin by training and working out, Clemons said he began the season in 10 times the best shape he’d ever been in.
“I was getting everything in my life in order, and I was wrestling better than I ever had,” he said.
He injured a knee early and underwent surgery. Yet he returned and was performing well when he was struck down in the meet with Gardner-Webb.
“He finished the match but he was lost. He didn’t know where he was. We thought he’d suffered a concussion,” Eslinger recalled.
Clemons hasn’t wrestled since. Even now in the wrestling room, if he tries to go he winds up dizzy and nauseous, and CT scans continue.
It wasn’t the ending the defending conference champion had envisioned.
“It’s not the way I wanted my career to end. It hurts, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said.
It took him a couple of weeks to come to grips with the career-ending injury, but his family needed him — almost as much as he needed his family.
“You do everything right and sometimes it doesn’t work out,” said Clemons, a native of Kissimmee, Fla. “I have moved on. I’ll get my degree in the spring, but right now I am doing what I can to help the other guys on the team.”
Eslinger said since his injury that Clemons had become the personal coach for teammate and fellow 174-pounder Sean Mappes.
“As a coach you want to focus on the great and the good. You have to win for job security, but the good is what we accomplish in the essence of life,” Eslinger said. “If I don’t change kids’ lives, then why am I in coaching?
“We didn’t get to use Levi when he was at his best, but he is the poster child for what this program is about. As a coach it stinks — for us and for him also — but I still feel like he is our biggest success this year because he has grown up so much. He has done everything right. I think he’ll look back and be grateful for his time here.”
Clemons agreed.
“If I could go back and choose schools again, there’s no way I would pick anybody over Chattanooga. I’ve matured and grown as a person, as a student and as a wrestler,” he said.
Contact Ward Gossett at wgossett@timesfreepress.com or 423-886-4765. Follow him at Twitter.com/wardgossett.