Eagles coach Clarence Arrington can be demanding but team's payoff is the 1A-11 district title
SARASOTA
Clarence Arrington isn’t the easiest coach to wrestle for.
He’s demanding. He’s picky. He yells sometimes.
This, of course, is all according to Arrington himself.
“I’m tough on them,” he said. “They have to get it right.”
Arrington knows no other way, just as he wouldn’t know what it would feel like to not be involved in wrestling in some capacity. That’s why when he had the chance to return to coach the sport at Sarasota Military Academy this season, he jumped on it.
“I was thinking about just hanging up coaching. My son graduated from Dunedin (High) and went to college, and I didn’t have any more dogs in the fight,” he said. “But this has been my whole life.”
Wrestling came to Sarasota Military Academy in 2012, and along with it came a legendary name — Sarasota High’s Hall-of-Fame coach Ron Jones, who was brought in to run the program. Arrington wanted to coach, so he took over the team at Braden River High in 2013 while still working as an instructor at SMA.
Now he’s running the Eagles, giving him a chance to coach at the same school where he works.
“I’ve known these kids since they’ve started ninth grade,” Arrington said. “Jovan Cine and Mason Gordon, I’ve known them since they were little babies.”
Arrington wrestled in high school and at the Division I level for the Army Black Knights. A retired major, he is a JROTC instructor at SMA.
“Retired from the Army, and here I am in Sarasota,” he said.
The Eagles seem happy to have him. Last Saturday, SMA rolled to the Class 1A-District 11 dual team title to qualify for this week’s regional tournament.
“He’s fun, because every day is something different with him,” said Cine, a senior who wrestles at 160 pounds. “It’s not the same thing. A lot of coaches, they’ve got the same schedule, the same strategies. But he changes it up every week.”
Despite being a relatively new team, SMA had one of the bigger teams at Saturday’s tournament. But Arrington isn’t looking for numbers as much as he is looking for guys who are committed to the program.
“I tell my kids there are pretenders and contenders. I’m kind of hard on the guys that come out and try to pretend they’re part of the group,” he said. “If you’re going to be a part of these guys, you’re going to be a part of these guys.
"If you’re not, I’m not going to give you credit. A lot of these guys walk around with our t-shirts, and I don’t allow it. If you come in and quit, you’re going to give everything back up. If I’ve got five kids on the team, fine. I’ve been there before.”
As they showed last Saturday, the Eagles are making the hard work pay off, and making Arrington happy he decided to stick with the sport he loves so much.
“They sacrifice,” Arrington said. “We start from the basics, and I always tell them, you can build off the basics.”