Career Highlights
BY THE NUMBERS
East Gaston 1992 Wresting Team: David Laws (103), Caine Beard (112), Jody Cherry (119), Darrell Steward (125), Tim Hawkins (130), Brian Anderson (135), Brian Stewart (140), Sean Anderson (145), Shelton Camp (152), Steven Carpenter (160), Brent Harrelson (171), Bart Davis and Jeremiah Brunson (189), Nicer Young (Hwt).
Season record: 14-1
1992 East Gaston Wrestling
No Time To Lose!
East Gaston wrestling doesn’t let change interfere with State title.
The year is 1992. The Olympic Games are in Barcelona, Spain. Bill Clinton is elected president. Jay Leno debuts on “The Tonight Show,” and IBM introduces a laptop, the ThinkPad 700C.
“Barney & Friends” premiers on TV and, in better news, the Chicago Bulls win their second consecutive NBA title.
In Mount Holly, the East Gaston High School wrestling team – which graduated six members, including four 1991 state finalists and underwent a coaching change – patches its pieces together and wins another Class 4A state championship.
“It was one of those things we wanted to continue and defend that title,” says Cain Beard, a junior 112-pounder. “We had a legendary coach (Doug Smith) retire, and we were young and had to kind of mesh together. It took a lot of adjustment, because of our having been used to doing things a certain way. And this new coach comes in, and we had to get to know each other and figure it out.”
The new coach was Bryan Lingerfelt, who at 23 was on the borderline of being a peer vs. being authority. And Smith, who led the team to a 22-0 record and Class 4A state title the year before and had coached for 13 seasons, was still in the building, down the hall.
“I was just a young coach that was hoping to help young men and East Gaston,” Lingerfelt says. “I saw it as an opportunity to help. The success we had I’m sure was unexpected, but that is what made it so special and what made these young men special that season.”
“Coach Smith was still teaching at the school, and all of us would go talk to him about strategy, but it was awkward for us,” says Beard, who coached as several high schools before taking his current role in 2008 as head coach at Rock Hill High School. “It was an awkward situation (for Lingerfelt) to follow a legend. When I got to Rock Hill, I heard about how great the teams were in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I kind of get the feeling of what Bryan must have felt. I know Bryan heard it from us: ‘That’s not how it was done!’ And I heard it at Rock Hill.”
Lingerfelt was a student-teacher as East Gaston in 1990 and helped coach football. He was hired at Surry Central High School after graduation from Appalachian State University in Boone, then was asked to return to East Gaston to coach wrestling for 1991-92.
For what it accomplished in 1992, the wrestling team is inducted into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
The group went 14-1, the only loss coming at Ashbrook in the regular season – an outcome that was reversed in the state finals.
“Ashbrook and us, at the time, were the two premier programs in the area, and we went to their place and had to deal with some lineup issues – I don’t remember what it was – and we took a loss,” Beard says. “And sometimes a loss is a good thing. I’ve always said as a coach, if you go undefeated I need to make the schedule tougher."
On the bus ride home, he says, the team pondered how to use the loss to their advantage. “Our goal as a team was not so much to avenge the loss but to put yourself in a position to win a state title. And we had done that, that night. We were going for our third state title.”
“I remember that bus ride as being quiet. I remember some guys crying,” says Brent Harrelson, a junior who wrestled at 171. “Whether we wanted to admit it nor not, Ashbrook was a very tough match. They were our rivals, and there was mutual respect, whether we wanted to admit it or not. It was important to beat those guys, then all of a sudden we had this mark on our record and we thought, we can’t do this.”
“The loss did bring the team together,” Lingerfelt says. “I believe Bart Davis may have said something to rally the guys. Losing to Ashbrook hurt their feelings, and they could have gone the other way as well, but they had a ‘tradition’ they wanted to continue.”
The Warriors beat Ashbrook 47-13 in the state Western final on February 6 to advance to the 4A dual-team title. It was Ashbrook’s first loss of the season.
On the night of the state final title match vs. Eastern winner Orange High (23-2), from Hillsborough, Beard says the term “three-peat” was “being thrown around. The (Chicago) Bulls didn’t do theirs until the next year, but the term was out there. And it was on our mind.”
“There was a certain standard we held ourselves to,” Beard says. “It’s about putting ourselves in a position to win a state title. That’s what we do. All of us understood how we had to do it, getting everyone mentally prepared and on the same page to be in that situation.”
East Gaston won 30-25.
“Before the match, we said don’t let anybody come in here and take it from us,” Lingerfelt said after the win. “That’s all I tried to do, keep the tradition of the program going. I just tried to guide it along.”
Following Harrelson’s pin at to give East Gaston the lead, Bart Davis (189) clinched the victory with one match remaining with a 10-5 win, making an Orange comeback mathematically impossible.
“Wrestling at a higher weight, especially toward the end of a match, is especially stressful when it’s close,” Harrelson says, “and all you can think of is, don’t let your nerves get in the way of what you’re trying to do. And that’s what it was.”
Orange took a 6-0 lead early, but decisions by Beard, Darrell Stewart (125) and Jody Chery (119) gave East Gaston a 10-6 lead. After Orange tied it at 12, Brian Stewart (140) won his match by pin and Shelton Camp (152) won 2-1 to improve his record to 27-0-1.
Harrelson, 45 now, says winning the championship was “surreal.”
“It was awesome. We were happy,” he says. “I can’t tell you how cool that was.”