Wrestling: Coach Erik Burnett adds another award to sparkling career

It's hard to believe there's anybody who hasn't told Erik Burnett he's doing a great job but the Elyria wrestling coach added another award to his lengthy resume Wednesday. The latest accolade came via a letter from the Ohio High School Athletic Association. "I would like to congratulate you on being selected as a 2019-2020 Coach of the Year in the sport of boys wrestling announced by the National Federation of State High School Associations Coaches Associations," OHSAA executive director Doug Ute wrote. It was the fourth time Burnett has been named Ohio's top coach. He was the Division I Coach of the Year in 2016 per the Ohio High School Wrestling Coaches Association, and was named the state's top overall coach by the National Wrestling Coaches Association in 2015 and last season. "It's obviously an honor for our program," Burnett said. "Everything is programmatic. They might call it 'Coach of the Year' but really it's 'Staff of the Year … Program of the Year,' because of all the people involved that make this thing go. It's not just one guy. Yeah, there's a head coach, but it's everybody involved and that's what's truly special about it." Wrapping up his 25th year as Elyria's head coach, Burnett looks to add to his impressive numbers at this weekend's district tournament. During his run he's coached 93 state qualifiers, 59 state placers, 25 state finalists and 12 state champions. His quarter century of success includes a 287-98 dual meet record, 13 conference championships — earned in the Pioneer Conference, the Northeast Ohio Conference and the Greater Cleveland Conference — three sectional tournament championships, seven dual team regional championships and five state runner-up trophies — three at the individual tournament and two at the dual team tournament. For his efforts, Burnett has also been named Coach of the Year by the three conferences listed above, the Lorain County Wrestling Coaches and Officials Association and the Greater Cleveland Coaches Association. Burnett, who was a four-time state champion at Oberlin High and an All-American in college, is also a three-time Hall of Fame inductee — the OHSAA High School Hall of Fame, the LCWCOA Hall of Fame and the Clarion University Sports Hall of Fame. The coaching doesn't stop at the end of the high school season, either. Burnett is the head coach of Burnett Trained Wrestling — an offseason freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling club — and has coached multiple wrestlers — including Logan Stieber, Hunter Stieber, Chris Phillips, Dustin Schlatter, Ryan Lang, Jamie Clark, Nathan Tomasello and Ben Darmstadt — to national championships in Fargo, N.D. He also coached six Team Ohio Junior freestyle dual teams to national titles in Oklahoma. While there have been plenty of great squads throughout the years, last season's will always be memorable because his two sons — Mick, a senior, and Nate, a sophomore — were on it, Elyria finished as the dual team state runner-up and the year ended in tragic fashion as the state tournament was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. "A lot of coaches in all sports really, really coached more than they ever had last year, as far as all the way around in being involved in kids' lives," Burnett said. "You had the kids that didn't have their basketball state tournaments and the wrestling state tournaments, and then in the spring they didn't have the spring sports. That's just hard in trying to help the kids through that. "It was a task and fortunately for our guys we had a close-knit group and although they didn't get the opportunity to do what they wanted to do, they're still tight. They went through that together, but it was tough on everybody. So kudos to all the coaches out there and everybody who managed to get through that." Besides matching the 2016 team's silver medal finish at the dual team state tournament, last year's team advanced nine wrestlers to the individual state tournament and many expected them to match the 2016 team's runner-up finish or perhaps bring home Elyria's first state championship since 1973. "There's a correlation always with the people around you," Burnett said. "We had a group like that back in 2016 and a few weeks ago there was some banter back and forth on texts and Snap(chat) — the 2016 team and the 2020 team are going back and forth on who would win a dual meet. It was kind of crazy and I got caught in the middle as a coach. "You look back at any special group of kids and it's just a flood of memories, and it's nice to have something I guess to commemorate that (2020) group." Contact Shaun Bennett at 329-7137 or sbennett@chroniclet.com. Like him on Facebook and follow him @ShaunBennettct on Twitter.