Within recent weeks, GeorgiaGrappler, a website covering wrestling in the state of Georgia, released its preseason rankings and placed the Greyhounds fifth. And although that’s the highest rating that Jones County head coach Adam Gillhouse can recall JCHS ever earning, the Greyhounds wrestling program is hardly coasting entering the summer. “Since we started three years ago as a staff, our message has been to raise the standard. We’re always trying to do better than we did the previous year. We had a really successful season, and now we want to improve on what we did in that previous year,” Gillhouse said.
The Greyhounds are coming off a fifth-place finish in the GHSA Class AAAAA state duals and coming in ninth in CONTINUED FROM>> B1 the state traditional meet, in which three wrestlers placed individually. They’ll move down to AAAA this year with the GHSA’s reclassifciation.
“We’re still chasing those top four, but there’s lots of teams chasing us now because if we don’t get better, we’ll get caught,” Gillhouse said. “With wrestling, everything we go into, we’re seeded. The goal of every tournament is to finish higher than your seed. That’s how we look at it; we want to finish higher than where we are.”
And one way to meet the raising standard comes with a busy summer for the Greyhounds.
This week, for example, Jones County is hosting a two-day camp with Sean and Codi Russell to go with twice a day workouts the next two months. July will also include camps with Coach Omi Acosta and his staff from Life University in addition to another session with former JCHS state champion wrestler Nate Carr Jr., now the head coach at Davidson College.
Sean Russell is the current head coach at Regional Training South, considered one of the top training centers in the United States for freestyle wrestling. He is a former NCAA Division I All American, Olympic trial qualifier, placed third in the Big Ten and was at one time a top-ranked high school wrestler. Codi Russell was a three-time SoCon Champion and a four-time NCAA qualifier. “The guys that we’re bringing in have wrestled at the top levels of college wrestling,” Gillhouse said.
“When they come in and are teaching techniques similar to what we are teaching all year long, it helps instill that in our guys.”
