Beloved wrestling coach's legacy endures one year after Las Vegas mass shooting
Three hours into a Pennsylvania youth wrestling program’s end-of-the-season pizza party, even the most patient parents in the room were plotting an early exit.
They had been fiddling with their phones and fidgeting in their seats for awhile, yet the head coach would not halt his monologue.
Determined to make sure he didn’t shortchange a single one of the nearly 50 wrestlers in the Shippensburg Elementary School program, coach Bill Wolfe Jr. called each of them to the front of the room one at a time to heap praise on them and award them a trophy. He devoted at least a couple minutes to every kid, sharing stories of their accomplishments, work ethic, quirky sense of humor or positive attitude.
“We’re sitting on hard chairs in the high school cafeteria, we’ve just eaten Papa John’s pizza and we’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, when is this going to be over? This is going on forever,’ ” said Ryan Johnson, a friend of Wolfe’s and a father of one of the boys in the program. “It’s almost embarrassing to think about now because it really was just an indication of Bill’s dedication to the kids. He was making sure that each kid was recognized, that none of them felt overlooked.”
Stories like that exemplify why Wolfe was such a beloved youth baseball and wrestling coach during his life and why his tragic death has hit the Shippensburg community hard. The full-time civil engineer and father of two cared deeply about giving kids in his programs the best possible experience and he was willing to sacrifice what little free time he had to do it.
Wolfe is among the 58 people who were cut down by gunfire at a country music festival in Las Vegas a year ago Monday in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The 42-year-old and his wife Robyn traveled to Las Vegas and bought tickets to the concert to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.
While Wolfe’s family may remember him as a loving husband, caring father, devout Christian and avid outdoorsman, many in Shippensburg knew him best as a volunteer coach. They recall a man so selfless he once stepped aside as head coach of a Little League team to make room for another dad with more playing experience; a man so dedicated he routinely stayed up until dawn making sure bracketing for the next morning’s wrestling tournament was done fairly; a man so detail-oriented he would peel up the wrestling mats and lay them again if they were so much as an inch or two off center.
“I don’t know if he slept sometimes,” said Brock Brenize, one of Wolfe’s closest friends since middle school. “That’s who Bill was. Anything Bill got involved with, he was going to immerse himself in it and he was going to do it right. In my eyes, sometimes he spent too much time. He could probably have done less and still had the same result without so much stress, but he’d still argue with me about that today if he were still alive.”
Growing up in a close-knit small town helped shaped Wolfe
In many ways, Wolfe is a reflection of the best aspects of the town where he grew up.
Situated in the heart of the Cumberland Valley, surrounded by sprawling farmland and lush countryside, Shippensburg is a slow-paced, working-class town founded by Scots-Irish immigrants nearly three centuries ago. It’s the sort of close-knit community where the streets are often deserted during Friday night football games and neighbors usually greet each other by name.
Growing up in Shippensburg helped instill Wolfe with a passion for sports, an insatiable work ethic and immense pride for his community, all qualities that contributed to his success as a high school wrestler in the early 1990s. Other members of the Shippensburg varsity team were more talented than Wolfe, but none displayed more grit in big matches.
When an opponent from Shippensburg’s rival high school caught him in an illegal headlock late in a key match one year, Wolfe refused to give up. He endured the near-chokehold so long that his face turned bright red, his coach grew frightened for his safety and his father got kicked out of the gym for making a ruckus in the stands.
Wolfe’s toughness made him a natural workout partner for younger teammate Frankie O’Brien, by far Shippensburg’s most gifted wrestler. They would square off daily in practice during the 1992-93 season, O’Brien using his superior skill to secure decisive victories more often than not but the stronger, scrappier Wolfe made him earn every point he scored.
“In all my years in the wrestling room, he was probably the most physical person I faced,” O’Brien said. “Bill wasn’t as good as me, but he made me better because he didn’t back down and he didn’t give an inch. Everything I did, I had to work for. He was tenacious. He kept coming. He had a will to get better and a will to win.”
If Wolfe’s competitiveness was his trademark on the wrestling mat, his meticulousness was his calling card elsewhere. The perfectionist tendencies that fueled Wolfe’s success in his day job as a civil engineer also revealed themselves when his sons reached elementary school and he began dabbling as a volunteer wrestling coach.
Other volunteers dared not touch the registration forms when Shippensburg hosted a tournament. Paperwork was Wolfe’s domain, and he wouldn’t risk a single kid falling through the cracks.
Other volunteers dared not tape down the wrestling mats without securing Wolfe’s approval. He had to first check to make sure they were centered perfectly with the basketball hoop.
“If it was off even a couple inches, we would have to pull the mats,” Johnson said with a laugh. “It became a running joke. ‘Don’t tape it yet. Bill hasn’t looked at it. You’re going to have to peel it back up.’ ”
For years, Wolfe served as Shippensburg wrestling’s booster club president and an assistant on the elementary school team coached by his brother-in-law Joey Finkey. When Finkey accepted an offer to become an assistant coach with the high school team in 2015, Wolfe only agreed to replace him as elementary-school head coach on one condition.
“He said, ‘Send me an email that you’re resigning,’” Finkey said. “I sent it from my phone to his phone standing beside him, but that was his type-A personality. You had to follow protocol.”
Wolfe’s painstaking attention to detail occasionally got under the skin of his fellow volunteers, but they typically overlooked it because his approach was always well thought out and purpose-driven. Plus, the other coaches always respected how patient Wolfe was working with the kids and how much time he devoted to bettering their experience.
“He took the time to get to know every kid,” Finkey said. “He understood not every kid was going to be a champion, but he wanted to try to make every kid better.”
Anniversary celebration turns terrifying, tragic
Wolfe was one month from starting his third season as head coach of the elementary school program when he and his wife Robyn dropped their sons at their grandparents’ house and boarded their flight to Las Vegas.
Both avid concert goers and country music fans, Wolfe and his wife bought tickets about a year in advance when they realized the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival coincided with their 20th anniversary. Wolfe was especially excited for the opening night of the festival because that’s when his favorite artist, Eric Church, was performing.
Sometime during Church’s set, the artist jumped into the crowd and greeted fans who were closest to the stage. Wolfe’s was the first hand he shook, a story the wrestling coach excitedly relayed to his family back home the following morning.
“That made his whole trip, I think,” Finkey said. “That was who he went to see.”
By the festival’s third night, Wolfe and his wife still appeared to be having a great time. They posted a smiling photo of themselves to social media only minutes before the gunman opened fire on the crowd from his 32nd-floor hotel room.
When Wolfe was one of the first concertgoers struck, Robyn crouched at his side as bullets rained down from the sky. She held him even as other people at the scene shouted for her to run, only leaving when it became clear that he had died.
“Hardest decision of her life,” Wolfe’s older brother Scott told reporters at a news conference last year. “The decision to leave her husband behind.”
With Robyn alone in Las Vegas awaiting official confirmation of her husband’s death, stunned family members rushed to her side. Shaken and grieving, they boarded the first available flight the following morning and then returned to Shippensburg with her a day later.
By that time, word of Wolfe’s passing had spread throughout the community. Shippensburg High School wrestling coach Tony Yaniello scarcely had time to mourn himself while juggling interview requests from reporters across the state and calls from distraught kids in his program.
“They were devastated,” Yaniello said. “One of my seniors sent me a long message a few days after it happened. ‘Coach,’ he said, ‘Push me as hard as I can this season. I want to dedicate this season to Bill.’ He was trying to honor Bill by doing his best as a wrestler.”
Family, friends struggle to cope with Wolfe’s death
Tough as it was on the Shippensburg wrestlers who lost a coach and a mentor, Wolfe’s death was hardest on his family.
Wolfe’s two sons didn’t wrestle last season, the thought of doing something that reminded them so much of their father was too much for them just a month or two after his death.
Finkey forced himself to coach because he knew that’s what Wolfe would have wanted, but he admits he spent much of the season in a fog. His thoughts often drifted to his late brother-in-law, especially when Shippensburg squared off against its rival school or sent wrestlers to compete in the district or state tournament.
“He’d be in the corner with his head down and you knew what was going on,” Yaniello said. “It was really tough on him. Bill was like a big brother to him.”
The most difficult day of the season for Finkey came the Friday before Shippensburg hosted its annual tournament for elementary-school wrestlers last February. The program’s new volunteer coaches worked hard to create a good experience for the kids – they just didn’t set up with the same methodical precision Wolfe would have.
“The new people did a phenomenal job, but they did things differently,” Finkey said. “The whole time, I wanted to say, ‘That’s not how Bill would have done it,’ but I couldn’t put that on those people.”
While the Shippensburg community raised over $80,000 for Wolfe’s wife and sons last fall via a GoFundMe campaign, the wrestling program was careful not to plan too many tributes out of deference to the family. Wolfe was not a self promoter by nature and Yaniello did not want to make the season any harder on Robyn or Finkey.
The youth baseball team Wolfe had previously helped coach wore black wristbands in his honor, but they decided not to do anything more grandiose. With Wolfe’s younger son on the team, the other coaches wanted to allow him to use baseball as a distraction rather than risk reopening old wounds.
When the one-year anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting arrives Monday, those closest to Wolfe will commemorate his death in their own way.
Finkey will no doubt have a good laugh over getting a rise out of Wolfe whenever he laid out the wrestling mats a few inches off center.
O’Brien will likely chuckle at the memory of a workout partner who typically left him bruised yet better after their daily sessions.
Brenize will surely reflect on Wolfe gently coaxing him to be more outgoing and sociable when they were in school together.
And Johnson might even muster a wry smile when thinking about Wolfe’s end-of-the-season pizza party filibusters that seemed to never end.
“Bill was the kind of man we need more of today,” Brenize said. “He was a decision-maker, a leader. He was a person that any young person or peer could look to for how to live a life, how to positively affect the world and the people around them.”
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Jeff Eisenberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at jeisenb@oath.com or follow him on Twitter!
