Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

NORTH SHELBY – For the first time ever, the five wrestling programs from Shelby County Schools will compete against each other to decide a champion.

Oak Mountain High School is set to host the inaugural Shelby County Schools Duals Tournament on Saturday, Nov. 16 at 9 a.m.

The tournament will pit Chelsea, Helena, Montevallo, Oak Mountain and Shelby County against each other in a round-robin competition. Each team will face each other once for a total of four matches during the day, with one school resting while the other four face each other.

The event started through a conversation between Bethany Ivey and Oak Mountain wrestling coach Jonathan Briggs where she suggested an event featuring all five Shelby County Schools.

Briggs then contacted the other county coaches and set the event up over the offseason.

For Briggs, it provides a great opportunity to build ties with the other local schools that they don’t see as much.

“This is like the only time that we can all be at the same place at the same time because all of us are in different divisions or classifications and so some of those kids we never see, like we hardly ever see Shelby county kids, the only reason why we see Helena kids is as we may run into them in one tournament and we actually started dueling each other every year, but it just gives the opportunity for our kids to see each other, and we have good kids all the way around,” Briggs said.

Briggs worked with new Chelsea coach Joseph Corkren, Helena coach Nick Souder, Montevallo coach Farrell Adams and Shelby County coach Austin Barnhill to make the event work well for each team.

They decided on a round-robin dual tournament on the season’s opening weekend to give their wrestlers the most amount of matches possible as early in the season as they could.

“I really was just talking to (the coaches) one-on-one like, ‘What do you think, and what would you want like it to be,’ and it’s really kind of a tune-up dual thing and it’s really to try to get all of our kids as many matches as we can,” Briggs said.

The coaches have worked together to turn the event into a highly-anticipated showcase that teams can continue to look forward to for years to come.

One of the ways they did that was by dubbing it “The Battle for the Ax,” which comes from the giant ax trophy that the winning team will get.

The idea came from Souder who had his own battle for an ax in college.

“He was like, ‘We used to do something in college with our rival where whoever won the dual got to keep an ax,” Briggs said. “Axes are cool, so I thought about doing something different but just always came back to that ax, so that’s the reason why we got it.”

With the backing of Oak Mountain’s booster club and OMHS, the coaches and parents used the new event as a chance to create the event they’ve always wanted to attend.

While things like on-site janitors and a more complete concessions stand may seem small or be taken for granted by other sports, not having those detracts from the tournament experience for the participants, and the SCS Duals Tournament wants to fix that.

“What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to make it a first-class event,” Briggs said. “We got janitors. We want some of the things that as coaches and parents and the booster club, what do we dislike when we go to other tournaments, and really, it’s dirty bathrooms, it’s no food at the snack bar, like it’s just granola bars and bananas.”

In addition to making the event’s infrastructure fan-friendly, the schools wanted to make the event as entertaining for participants and fans as possible, which is another reason why they landed on the duals format as opposed to an individual tournament.

“We want to make this something that people want to come back to, and there’s nothing more exciting and wrestling in my opinion than watching duals,” Briggs said. “Individual tournaments are great, you get some really great matches, but as far as the spectator point of view, there’s nothing better than watching a dual.”

Overall though, the goal of the event is to help showcase the talent at each program within the school system.

With each of the five programs having a history of producing state title contenders and college signees, Briggs hopes that this event gives each school a platform for their wrestlers to shine, no matter what classification they compete in.

“There’s some studs throughout everybody’s lineup,” Briggs said. “Chelsea has a few, Shelby County has a few, Helena has a couple, and Montevallo, (Adams) always has least one or two kids that can compete really well. So having us all at the same place at the same time is the way that we can showcase that, there’s two other schools in the county that they do wrestle, but we have a lot of talent too.”