Coach Westfahl,
I understand where you are coming from. I think it would have been great for a Kansas favorite son to have got the job. Like I said I had a favorite and he is a Kansas native. I think he would have been very good too. I had a few others in mind and they were all from Kansas too.
I had never heard of Coach Jimmy May and that is because I really do not follow that closely high school wrestling outside of Kansas and maybe the Kansas City Missouri area. But you know I had never heard of Coach Bob Devaney who was hired as the football coach of my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers for the 1962 season. He had coached the Wyoming football team the previous five years and had compiled a 35-10-5 record, a .750 winning percentage. I was only 11 years old but I had been raised on Nebraska football and I did not know who this Devaney character was or how you could jump from Wyoming's coach to Nebraska's coach. He was an unknown but he coached Nebraska football for the next 11 years and compiled an incredible 101-20-2 record a .829 winning percentage. He took Nebraska to nine bowls, 7 Big championships plus one year as co-champion. Nebraska was also national champion in two of those years. He also groomed a native Nebraska assistant coach Tom Osborne who followed him and compiled an even better record. Believe me at the end of Devaney's tour, the good fans of Nebraska football did not care that Devaney came from the Wyoming football program. And they won't be at all upset if Bo Pellini ends up resurrecting Nebraska football to the level that Devaney did.
Now I am not saying that Jimmy May is going to do exactly what Devaney did but he might end up having college coaching success similar to what he has achieved at the high school level in Nevada. Just think how important that would be to the long term success of the Baker University wrestling program, if he could achieve that. Maybe at the end of that successful run Coach May will hand off a well established NAIA powerhouse wrestling program to a native Kansas assistant like Devaney did to Osborne back in 1973.
I would bet it was the goal of Dan Harris to build an annual NAIA national wrestling power at Baker University. I think he hired Jimmy May with that thought in mind. It will be a wonderful thing for Kansas wrestling if it happens.
