By JOHN EBY
Dowagiac Daily News

“I know the head wrestling coach position is still up in the air,” Jarrid Bradford addressed the Dowagiac Board of Education June 21 in the middle school cafeteria. “I came here to speak positively about the situation, and I really wanted to put on the record how important that particular position is to me, being a Dowagiac graduate from the wrestling program.”

“John Green is a personal friend of mine,” Bradford said. “I’ve known him going on 20 years. He’s been a coach and mentor to me. I’d like all of you as board members to know the side of John I know. You know him as an employee. I know him as a coach, a good friend, father and neighbor.”

Bradford, a 1998 DUHS graduate, in 2007 was named Dowagiac’s Firefighter of the Year for 2006. He has also been a police officer, finishing first in his 2003 class at Kalamazoo Valley Police Academy. He also taught Cassopolis fifth graders and in Dowagiac’s migrant program at Sister Lakes School.

When Bradford met Green, he was assistant high school coach and came down to Central Middle School to work with him and other young grapplers.

“The team placed second in the state in 1998,” he recalled.

“It was a very successful experience and a lot of my teammates are very close to Coach Green because he’s very personable. He’s a lifelong Dowagiac citizen who graduated in 1969 — sorry for putting that out there — so he’s been involved in area wrestling for 41 years.

“In the 1970s as a wrestler he was part of the infamous ‘Judd’s studs’ at SMC (Southwestern Michigan College). It’s been nothing but positives. Some of Dowagiac’s most successful wrestlers will go back and attribute his one-on-one coaching style to their success — including my own.”

“One of the most important things that any organization or governing body can do,” Bradford said, “is to stand back, take in all of the information and adjust the decision-making it does on all of the information. It’s not a sign of weakness by any board to take a second look at something, especially when all of the information is so positive. As a citizen, a voter and a former Dowagiac student athlete, that’s really what I’ve come to ask you to do.”

“This issue was a little upsetting,” Bradford said, so he contacted friends Ian Shields and Charley Van Husan, who wrote letters to the board about the engineers, doctors, veterinarians and Navy pilots molded in the program.

“A lot of these people trace their success back to the determination to athletics and a hard, rigorous training program,” Bradford said. “More than 10 years after high school, they still refer to him as a mentor and call him ‘Coach Green.’ He’s impacted young people’s lives in a permanent, positive manner. I’d like all of you to consider that when you are presented with this issue. I don’t pretend to know all the details. That’s not my place. I just wanted to speak positively. In 2003, Coach Green was voted regional and state assistant coach of the year in the area. In 2004, regional head coach of the year. There were six state team appearances Coach Green has been responsible for with Coach Chuck Rubino.”