After 31 years of coaching and teaching (ten of which were at Caldwell County), Braves’ wrestling head coach Dennis Walls has hung up his hat for the last time.
Walls, who has been eligible for retirement once he turned 55 this year, made the difficult decision to retire after several years of thought because as he says, “in a team like ours, there’s never a good stopping point when you have a constant stream of new athletes rolling in. You will always want to be part of them and at some point, you just have to step back and say ‘ok, no more’.”
While coaching for the Braves, Walls has led Union to two back-to-back state championships in 2007 and 2008 while also claiming seven regional championship titles from 2004 to this year and five runner-up regional titles in 1992, 1994, 1999, 2002 and 2003.
During his 31 years of coaching, Walls has had 195 individual state qualifiers, 89 state placers, three outstanding wrestlers at state, 18 individual state champs, 12 individual state runner-ups and several other placers. In 2006, Union also won the sportsmanship team award.
As coach, Walls has also been awarded state coach of the year for 2007 and 2008, as well as national coach of the year finalist in 2007. Including this season, Walls has a career total of 506 wins while at Caldwell and Union Counties.
Now that he’s retired, Walls and his wife, Cathy, have already started to plan various trips and side projects, something they weren’t able to do while Walls was working.
“I’m glad to have him home,” Cathy laughed. “I get to see a lot more of him.”
Starting this spring break, the two will travel to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to watch Union’s softball and baseball teams and then they will head to New Orleans. From there, the Walls’ throw their hands up and shrug.
“Who knows? That’s the beauty of this,” Cathy said. “We can travel to anywhere now and that’s our goal - to see all 50 states.”
Their plans also include, at some point, a two-week stint in Europe and a trip to Hawaii as well as traveling all the way up the east coast this summer.
“That’s another reason I decided to retire at 55,” Walls said. “I wanted to be in good health where I could be able to do these type of things. I didn’t want to work my life away. I had a heart attack four years ago and it has really put a lot of things in perspective for me.”
While it may seem like Walls is glad to finally kick back and relax, there’s still a part of him that is going to miss being involved with wrestling. For him, his wrestling team was his other “family” and one of his main philosophies.
“It’s always been my philosophy that first in your life is God, second is your family, third is school and fourth is wrestling,” Walls said. “God is the most important thing in our lives followed by our family and these are the values that we keep for the rest of our life, give or take the wrestling part.
We (wrestling team) spend so much time together that we are, in a lot of ways, family and for me, that’s going to be the biggest thing I miss. I’m not just going to up and forget about them, though. I’m still going to attend matches and cheer them on because in a lot of ways, they’re still my family.”
