Lakeside wrestler Kimball Rippy takes different path to state championship

Some high school athletes follow a path blazed by those who came before them. Others have a path chosen for them. A lucky few are allowed to carve out their own path.

Kimball Rippy got off his path entirely. At least for a while.

Rippy, a senior at Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, won a state wrestling title in February. But his coach, his parents – even Rippy, himself – weren’t sure his senior season was going to happen at all. It almost didn’t.

In the late fall, Rippy went off the grid for a few weeks, time he said he needed “to find myself” during a chaotic time in an ever-increasingly chaotic world.

“There’s a lot of white noise and different voices coming from different ends of many places,” he said. “Whether good or bad, or left or right – you know, if you want to get political. I just wanted to pull away from that.”

So, he did – he pulled away from it all. And though the time away was short it was sufficient for him to take stock, reevaluate, and come back more focused – “humbled,” he said – and ready to resume his path.

Off the grid

Overwhelmed by the world and his place in it, Rippy and a couple of buddies decided to withdraw from society for a while. One of the friends had access to a cabin in the woods. The group would go up from time to time to get away, but they thought they’d give it a go full time for a bit.

Rippy kept up with his studies online but moved out of his parents’ house and just tried to establish some quiet autonomy.

“It was an awesome experience,” he said. “I loved it so much. I wanted to find myself and these other people that I was with, they wanted to find themselves.”

They went fully immersive in the experience.

“We ate clean. We ate organic,” Rippy said. “We tried to cleanse ourselves in that way and meditate and for me, I was trying to grow closer to God and it was a great experience.”

The friends discussed getting construction jobs or starting a business, but society kept calling Rippy back.

“So, it was an awesome experience. But yeah, it just didn’t make sense,” he said. “I’m 18 and I’m still in school and it’s my senior year. My parents were like, ‘Hey, I think you should come back home and live out the rest of your senior year.’ ”

When the first week of wrestling practice came and went, Lakeside coach Andy Hamilton reached out to Rippy.

“I figured out how to get ahold of him through his mom,” Hamilton said. “I said, ‘Kimball, you’re a senior, I think you should come out. I think you’re gonna be really mad if you don’t finish out your career.’ And (Rippy) randomly just says, ‘OK. Yeah coach, I’ll be there tomorrow.’ ”

But Rippy still wasn’t completely sold.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna wrestle this year. I kind of just want to do my thing.’ And as I came back, you know, to my friends and my wrestling buddies, they were like, ‘You should wrestle. You got to wrestle.’ And the day that I came back to practice, I was like, ‘I’m wrestling.’

“You know, you forget why you love the sport so much, especially when you when you didn’t have a season prior. It’s tough.”

Underdog

Rippy wrestled all four years of school, and though he became a strong wrestler he had never won in a tournament setting. In fact, he barely qualified for state. He didn’t win districts and he finished in third place at regionals to earn the final spot to state.

“My whole season was the ultimate underdog story,” he said. “I never won a single tournament. I’d get second or I’d get third. And then one tournament, I got knocked out. I got a concussion, and I didn’t know what my season was gonna look like. I was really concerned that it was over.”

Rippy was cleared by doctors and got back on the mat. At districts, he was beaten by Freeman’s Owen Orndorff, who was ranked in the top five in the state in the 220-pound weight class in 1A for most of the season. He was then beaten by Toppenish’s Anthony Nava in a semifinal at regionals and was put into an elimination match against Jackson Forsythe of Connell. Rippy pinned Forsythe to move on to state – but barely.

Rippy won his first two matches at state, putting him on a collision course with Orndorff again in a semifinal.

“He beat me all season long, was a really tough wrestler,” Rippy said. “I pinned him in the second period and honestly, that pin was better than winning state. My coach hugged me and then he tossed me on the mat and we were celebrating. It was really awesome.”

Rippy couldn’t say what the difference was that day against a wrester who had number up until that point.

“I don’t know. I think I just wanted it more,” he said. “I hung with him. He’s a tough kid. I mean my face is all bruised right now from it. But I just wanted it more. I feel like he might have come in a little overconfident. I came in, you know, ready to do my thing and wrestle.”

That set up a rematch with Nava.

“Even before the match, I had a quiet confidence, knowing that I can beat this kid,” Rippy said. “It was amazing. It was the coolest feeling.”

The experience of being back in the Tacoma Dome for Mat Classic is something Rippy will remember, especially after missing it last season due to the pandemic.

“It’s a crazy experience,” he said. “You walk into the dome, and the ceiling just seems like it’s 1,000 feet high when you first get there.

“My freshman year it was so big – it was huge. And then as the years progressed, it kind of got smaller as you got larger and mentally got larger, you got more confident in the Dome.

“So yes, it was really cool. And then I was way more confident in this year than I ever have been.”

“We kind of joked after the tournament,” Hamilton said. “If you place at districts, or you place at regionals, a state placer or Tri-State placer, you get your name on the wall in the Lakeside (wrestling) room. A lot of kids make that big push because they want to have their name on that wall.

“Kimball wanted that, but literally the only thing on his plaque is gonna say ‘Kimball Rippy, 2022 state champ.’ ”

Gotta be the shoes

But first, Rippy – maybe even subconsciously – had another hurdle to get over.

He forgot his shoes.

At the team’s practice on Thursday before state at Kentlake High School, Rippy realized that he had packed the wrong wrestling shoes.

“I brought my little brother’s shoes and he has bigger feet than me,” he said. “So we’re practicing Thursday night, and these things are like clown shoes, just flopping around everywhere.”

“He’s just falling around all over the place,” Hamilton said. “It’s not a good setup. It doesn’t look good.”

Rippy and Hamilton approached Kentlake coach Jeremy Williams to see if he could help.

“He looked around for 30 minutes,” Rippy said. “He’s like, ‘I can’t find anything. I think I’ve got one more thing. Let me go look.’ ”

Williams came back five minutes later with a vintage pair of ASICS wrestling shoes.

“These are old school, like 2005 or 2006,” Hamilton said.

Williams explained to them that the shoes are his “state shoes,” out of his personal collection – wrestling shoes he’s worn to state every year for the past 15 or so.

“They were awesome,” Rippy said.

“So (Williams) says to me, ‘Please give them back to me. Do not ruin them.’ I tried them on, and they fit like a glove. They were awesome. They fit perfect.”

And then he went out and won state in borrowed shoes.

“(Williams) was so excited when I got into the finals,” Rippy said. “He’s like, ‘My shoes are in the finals.’ I came up to him after to give him the shoes and gives me a big hug and he was super excited. He’s like, ‘Hey, I want you to sign the shoes.’

“He had me sign the shoes with a silver sharpie.”

‘Humbling experience’

Rippy may have taken a different path than anyone else to win a state wrestling title this season, but he wouldn’t change anything.

The reflection he sought in that cabin in the woods came around to find him.

“I think it was just a reassurance of my independence,” he said. “You know, like, ‘You’re gonna do great on your own.’ But I think at the same time it was humbling. My parents were worried for me and I just didn’t know what I was doing, exactly. So, it was a humbling experience, too.”

Sometimes society doesn’t give kids enough room to think for themselves. Rippy was proud to have figured it out for himself.

“I feel like that pressure is only crushing kids more – to kind of have this false reality portrayed for them – when in reality, they need to start thinking for themselves or to think, ‘Hey, what am I? What are my values? What are my morals?’ And I feel like people are letting the world happen to them, they’re not happening to the world.”

Rippy is still taking classes online but has enjoyed being back around his wrestling teammates, which include his younger brother and sister.

“When you’re all in, when you’re in the same practice every day and you’re all going through the same pain, it’s like a family. It’s a brotherhood,” he said. “The social aspect and the friends that I have in wrestling are some of the tightest bonds that I have with people in my life – because we all go through that same pain every day.

“It makes me nervous, a little bit, just to think where I would be without the work that I had put in this year.”

“To go from living in the woods to being state champion is a cool, cool thing for him,” Hamilton said.

After graduation, Rippy is planning to serve a mission for two years.

“So not everyone has that same belief, but for my morals, I believe that I need to give some time to God,” he said. “Because he’s given me so much and he’s shown me so much. I want to serve others for two years in my life.”

It’s just another direction his path will take him.

“It kind of goes back to the idea of kids breaking away from the reality that their parents have built for them in finding their own thing,” he said. “And that was kind of my experience – going to that cabin was breaking away from the reality my parents had built me.

“I loved this life that I lived right next to the lake and these trails. But yeah, I needed to find, you know, what reality do I want to have in my life? And how do I want to build that?”