This weekend we will celebrate Nebraska high school wrestling with the 2025 state championships. More for me, but hopefully for you too, I offer the following.
After the following article graced (?) the pages of my hometown newspaper I also published it on this website back in February of 2012. I came across my copy of the Arnold Sentinel that included this original story and it is, if nothing else, original.
Thought today would be a good time to revisit the article, and the state championship story it told.
Hope you enjoy...
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Today is the second day of the 2012 Nebraska state wrestling tournament. It was this weekend 40 years ago my beloved alma mater, Arnold High School, won its first-ever state championship, winning the Class C wrestling title.
And they did it with just three guys.
Three qualifiers scored enough points to win the championship. Three qualifiers from a program that was only four years old at the time. I wrote the following to be published in my hometown paper, The Arnold Sentinel, the place where my career started, and thought I’d share it with you.
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It was, to that point, the greatest athletic achievement in school history. A huge moment shared by a small group of people who weren’t exactly sure what they were doing.
Forty years ago this week the Arnold High School wrestling team won the state championship. The program was in only its fourth year, a program which for the first year of competition didn’t own a real wrestling mat and the athletes were learning their sport by reading about it out of a book.
And some help from the new kids in town.
When all was said and done that weekend Arnold had scored 36 points, a puny number by today’s scoring system, but it was two more point than Plainview had scored and it was enough to win the first state championship in school history.
RICH FERGUSON WAS a basketball player. Not a good one, but still. When approached about joining the Arnold High wrestling team by head coach Tom Aspegren he was not quick to say yes.
“When he said ‘wrestling’ the first thing I thought of was jumping off the top rope of the ring or the sleeper hold, that sort of thing. I wasn’t interested,” says Ferguson, who is now a construction contractor in Denver, Colorado.
Coach Aspegren wasn’t talking about professional-style wrestling, he was talking about having Ferguson join the school’s fledgling high school program, one which was in only its fourth year of existence in 1972. Ferguson would eventually say yes and become part of history.
Allan Halstead, Rich Ferguson and Roger Seda are names that might not ring a bell with new folks to town but back in the day they were heroes within the community. All three would win medals at the 1972 state meet and together they won the Class C state team championship.
Maybe the biggest hero of all was no longer even a member of the team. No, John Phillips played a quiet, behind-the-scenes role which helped put the team on track for its date with destiny.
“None of us knew anything about wrestling and, to be honest, neither did coach. We were all learning it together and John and Paul Phillips were doing a lot of the teaching,” says Seda, now a cattle rancher north of Anselmo. “You look back now and it was sort of comical.”
THE PHILLIPS FAMILY had moved to Arnold from Kansas where the boys competed in high school wrestling and brought a deep knowledge of the sport. John, Paul and Jim Phillips did more than just bring knowledge to the program, though, they produced great wrestling. John was the school’s first state medalist, finishing fourth in 1970, and Jim was a three-time medalist, including an undefeated 1973 championship.
“It was a situation where I’d been able to learn by doing in Kansas and when I got up here Tom (Aspegren) let me help, teaching what I knew,” says John, who after high school served in Vietnam and arrived back stateside shortly after Arnold’s championship performance. Thereafter he served as a volunteer assistant to the Arnold wrestling program. “I guess you’d say I was a graduate assistant for the next 25 years.”
Armed with pretty much just the basics of the sport, Arnold still managed to win eight of 10 dual matches (back when duals there the thing) and competed in just two tournaments, finishing a surprising third at the rugged Mullen Invitational and then third at the Amherst Invitational. Good enough but neither those results, nor a fifth-place finish at the district meet held in Gibbon, gave any hint of the magic that was about to follow.
The district meet, in fact, had been an abject disaster, from the seeding meeting prior to the meet right through the day’s competition. For instance, Jim Phillips was unbeaten going into the tournament but was beaten following some “home cooked” officiating, remembers Coach Aspegren, and Paul Phillips, another accomplished wrestler, also failed to qualify for state.
While Seda “had the whole package, athletic ability, quickness and knowledge of the sport,” says Aspegren, and Ferguson had developed into an outstanding, complete wrestler, Halstead kept things real simple when he was on the mat.
“Allan was tremendously strong and really committed himself to only one or two moves, which was enough. He just overpowered people,” says Aspegren. A basketball player of sorts before this, his senior year, he made the most of this one chance in the sport of wrestling.
“I always said Dan Keyser made me a state champion wrestler,” says Halstead.
He didn’t plan on it happening that way. After all, he’d played three years of basketball and even though he hadn’t lettered yet he had plans to play as a senior. But at practice one day he was sitting on the bench while a couple of freshmen, including Keyser, who already had the look of a future star, which he would become, were getting some extra reps in practice.
“I leaned over and told Mr. (LaMar) Lind, our coach, ‘guess I’ll be going out for wrestling’,” he says with a big ol’ Halstead laugh.
FERGUSON, LIKE SEDA was there in the beginning, freshmen on Arnold’s first high school wrestling team. The first season, 1968-69, was nothing to brag about, or remember at all, really. “Coach said you would letter if you won a match,” says Ferguson. “Only two guys, Herb Hall and Keith Andre lettered. You do the math.”
The following year Ferguson won a district tournament title but not without a little sartorial controversy.
“What we had for uniforms were our football pants with the pads removed and a T-shirt that read ‘Arnold’ across the front. At district they said we had to have a real uniform and so we borrowed them from other teams; mine was from North Platte St. Pat’s,” he remembers. From such humble beginnings a state champion would be born...
ONCE IN LINCOLN, it was generally conceded Seda would be The Man. He hardly ever lost and much was expected of him at that state meet. There would be one little roadblock to greatness, though, and it occurred the night before the meet started.
“We were staying at the Cornhusker Hotel and that night I sort of broke training,” says Seda, laughing at the memory. “You could say I really wasn’t ready to wrestle the next morning.”
Seda lost his opening match to the same wrestler he’d beaten in the district final. The loss probably won the state meet for Arnold.
“By losing in the first round I had to wrestle something like five wrestleback matches. I scored a lot more points that way than I would have if I’d have won state,” he says.
Using his experience at the state tournament, this being his third trip to state, Ferguson advanced to the finals, beating a wrestler from Mitchell in the semifinals, and benefitting from the fact the top seed in his 140-pound weight bracket had become ill and did not compete.
Halstead, well, he went about pinning his way into the finals.
“There was a scoring change after the first round and it was at that time there was a two-point addition for pins, which really worked well for us because that’s the way Roger and Allan usually won their matches,” says Aspegren.
Seda won his way back to third place at 155, in the third-place match beating the wrestler who had beaten him in the first round, while Ferguson finished second. That left Halstead at 185, who with a pin could - miraculously, wonderfully - put Arnold in the lead. The entire state could be watching because the finals were on this newfangled thing called “educational TV,” today’s NETV.
HALSTEAD, WHO HAD LOST THREE TIMES that season and avenged two of them, one coming in the state semifinals against a wrestler from Ravenna, dominated his championship match, winning with an early pin.
“Allan didn’t waste any time. He went to the center of the mat, picked up his opponent, got him on the mat and pinned him what seemed like right now. (It was, as 3:36 was the pin time.) We had the lead and I was just praising God because I knew we at least had second place,” says Aspegren.
The reason for the doubt about winning it all? In the final match of the day, the heavyweight match, Plainview would send heavily favored Bob Lingenfelter to the mat. The future Husker lineman, a two-time all-Big 8 selection and future pro football player, was upset in the final, 1-0, and Arnold had its championship.
“We (three) were all up around the mat because we knew by then if (Lingenfelter) lost we’d win state,” remembers Ferguson. “That was pretty exciting until his opponent (Mark Hines of North Bend) came out and was, like, a third his size. When the match was over we ran out on the mat and hugged the guy that beat him - true story.”
HALSTEAD LATER HAD another wrestling adventure of a lifetime. The week after the state meet he wrestled in a high profile AAU meet held at Lexington, finishing third, and in the process qualified to be part of a team of Nebraska wrestlers who would compete internationally. The Arnold community held a couple of fund-raisers for him and Halstead was off to compete in such exotic locales as Mexico City, Guatemala City and Panama City. Toto, we’re not in Kansas, nor Arnold, anymore...
“We wound up in Venezuela and because I took Spanish in high school so they made me the translator,” says Halstead. “We weren’t sure where we were going but this man we spoke with took a map and drew a line to a spot 13 hours into the continent and said, in his own language, it’s the last place in the world he’d ever want to be. And that’s where we wrestled.”
TOM ASPEGREN WAS TIRED. And who could blame him? After all, the gut-wrenching emotion of leading his team to a state title, it all coming down to the last match, would have been enough to drain any man. But wait, there’s more.
Aspegren’s first child, Tonya, was to be born the Tuesday of that week, the blessed event planned to take place at the North Platte hospital. After a false alarm on Tuesday night, Aspegren was up all night and taught school the next day. The next night, Wednesday, it was the same thing, no baby but he’s still up all night. Finally, Tonya was born Thursday at noon...which is about the same time the Arnold wrestling team was to take off for Lincoln. They’d have to wait.
“I didn’t get back to Arnold until about three o’clock and by then I was exhausted, too tired to drive. We took my car but I had one of the boys drive and I got a little sleep,” he remembers.
Two days later he’d have coached a state championship team.
AS A POSTSCRIPT to the whole matter, it’s interesting to know the ‘72 team has ties to other great achievement by the local wrestling program. John Phillips’ younger brother, the late, great Jim Phillips, would win himself a state title in 1973 and medal twice more, while Rich Ferguson’s younger brother, Joe Ferguson, would win a state championship in 1979, as part of a team which finished third at state and also counted his teammate Brent Olofson as a state champion. (Dan Purcell is the only other state wrestling champion in Arnold High history, turning the trick in 1983.)
It’s also worth mentioning there was a common denominator between those great wrestling teams of the ‘70s - John Phillips’ contributions as a coach and the building of a powerhouse program.
“Frosty Ferguson was a huge supporter who really wanted our program to succeed,” says John Phillips. “He had boys who wrestled (Rich, Barry, Ranald, Joe) and he wanted to see the program be a success. He paid my wages to see to it I could have the time to help coach those teams. He was willing to do whatever it took to make sure we had a winner.”
As an eighth-grader that year, 1972, I remember setting trap at the Arnold gun club the morning after the Cardinals had won the state championship. I remember excitedly telling a group of riflemen about our school’s great achievement and getting a unanimous response.
“We did?”
We did, they did, and in the process made state wrestling history.
