Greg Edgelow was a scrappy kid.
When older teens started bullying him in Grade 8, Edgelow took up wrestling — he figured it would help him fight.
That’s not what went down.
“I made better decisions,” says Edgelow, who ranked number-two for his weight class in Vernon by the end of that year.
“By then I had a lot of confidence that the sport gave me, so I didn’t need to show people that I could be the strongest,” he said.
“I did it on the mat.”
Now 53, Edgelow can look back proudly on six national championships, bronze and gold medals at the 1991 Pan American and 1994 Commonwealth Games, and going toe-to-toe with the champions of the 1994 Barcelona Olympics and the 1998 World Wrestling Championships in Tehran.
But the gold medal Edgelow recently brought to Haida Gwaii was minted just last year.
It his first medal as a coach and Edgelow, who has Cree ancestry, won it together with the junior boys soccer team at the 2017 North American Indigenous Games.
At Tahayghen Elementary, he had kids wear it along with the Team Canada jackets for the upcoming Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang so they could share that “gold-medal feeling.” Edgelow also brought it to Gudangaay Tlaats’gaa Naay, where he gave a weekend wrestling clinic, partly for the high school wrestlers competing for GTN at the Northwest zones in February.
Being an Olympic wrestler who coaches soccer isn’t so unfamiliar to Edgelow, whose first wrestling coach was a hockey player.
In fact, it only when Edgelow started at Simon Fraser University that he got coached by an experienced wrestler — Pierre Morton, who won several wrestling and judo medals as a blind and deaf athlete competing in the Paralympic Games.
“Coaching is really key,” Edgelow says, but for young players especially, teaching technique is only a small part of the job.
“All you need is somebody who cares about kids, and the kids know they care,” he said.
Speaking to students at Gudan’gaay Tlaats’gaa Naay, Edgelow mentioned a few of the challenges he faced in his high school years.
There were drug problems in his family, and an aunt, an uncle, and a grandfather who committed suicide. Another uncle was murdered and so was, as he found out recently, his biological father.
Sport gave Edgelow a way through many minefields.
Knowing how hard he worked as a wrestler, he said teachers gave him breaks he doesn’t think he would have had otherwise — support that kept him from spiralling. Even now, after retiring from competition, he still draws on his experience as an athlete to power whatever life throws his way.
Talking with the Old Massett Village Council, Edgelow said investing in sports for youth is like “preventative medicine.” It builds good relationships between teammates and coaches, and encourages a resilience that goes well beyond the gym.
“I was never the strongest, never the fastest, never the most skilled,” he said. But on the mat Edgelow was like a dog with a bone — he pinned quicker, more naturally gifted rivals by working them until they started making mistakes.
“It’s just that I never gave up,” he said.