Character match

It’s been said that Rick Giampietri is built the way he is for good reason.

The barrel-chested football, wrestling and golf coach at Central Valley, known to everyone as Coach G, needed the extra space to house the big, soft heart he has for all the students and athletes he’s had over his long, long career at Spokane-area high schools. And with each passing year, it swells just a bit more. He has more kids to love.

“He’s definitely a high-character kind of guy,” explained senior Tyler Simmet. “You just automatically respect him. There would be times when we’d be behind in a game, like we were against Lewis and Clark, and we’d all dig down because we didn’t want to let him down. Our character came through, too.”

Simmet has a special relationship with Coach G. To him, the G stands for Grandpa.

“Playing for him has been awesome,” he said. “He’s had me around the program since I was little. I always went to camps with him, even when I was in middle school.

“My mom is a single mom. In a lot of ways, he’s been another father to me.”

The feelings obviously go both ways. There’s always an extra twinkle in Giampietri’s eye when he talks about his grandson.

“It’s been as much fun for me to coach Tyler as it was for me to coach my own son,” the coach said. “I’ve just had a ball. Tyler is one of those guys who’s a hard worker and just a lot of fun to be around. He’s a little bit more of a self-made athlete than his dad was and he’s a lot quieter than Rick was. And he’s very competitive. Even when he was 5 and 6 years old, he’d get out there on the wrestling mat with a frown on his face.

“He’s just someone you could always talk to – he’s real easy to talk to. And he’s always talked like an adult and carried himself the same way.”

Simmet decided to skip much of the summer freestyle wrestling season, including a trip to nationals, to focus on preparing himself to play football.

A year ago, the 130-pound wrestler managed to add just 10 pounds to his wrestling frame to be a CV running back.

This summer he managed to tip the scales at 165 pounds at the start of fall turnouts. With the added bulk and the extra speed work he did over the summer, it allowed his grandfather to move starting running back Brad Whitley to wide receiver and add even more effective weapons to his offensive arsenal.

The move helped the Bears reach the state Class 4A quarterfinals, where the Bears fell to Ferris, with Simmet averaging more than five yards per carry and Whitley more than 20 per catch.

“Boy, he lifted hard over the summer,” a proud grandfather said. “Not only did he do our speed camp, he went to another speed camp as well. His lifts got really good for a smaller guy, too. He squatted more than 400 pounds. He made himself into a football player over the summer.”

“For my birthday I got some personal training sessions and I put them to good use,” Simmet said. “My times got quite a bit faster because of the speed work I did, and my vertical jump went up a lot – six or seven inches. I couldn’t believe how much higher I could jump.”

Simmet expects the extra work in the weight room will pay off on the wrestling mat as well.

Even at 130 pounds, Simmet’s approach to wrestling was always less about quickness and more about strength. Now at 145, his body better fits his wrestling style.

“The extra upper-body strength will help me on the mat, I’m sure,” he said. “But what will really help me, I think, are all the squats I did and the work I did on my legs. In wrestling, your strength is in your legs and in your hips. It’s hard for guys to score on you when you have strong legs and strong hips. I did a big wrestling camp full of guys who had been to state and placed. I wasn’t taken down one time the whole camp.”

Whether or not that carries over to the Greater Spokane League wrestling season is a question that must wait for an answer. Simmet injured his knee in the quarterfinal football game with Ferris.

“I hurt my knee in the first quarter of that game,” he explained. “It’s called ‘degloving.’ Essentially, a part of my skin tore away from the surrounding tissue. It was painful and my knee just blew up like a balloon.”

“I didn’t know about it at the time,” his coach/grandfather said. “In the second half, one of our assistant coaches came over and told me that Tyler had hurt his knee. I went over to take a look at it and it was all swollen up.”

In essence, doctors say, the skin that has been sheared away from the tissue and its blood supply is like a skin graft and it’s treated in much the same way: It must reattach itself.

The injury kept Simmet off the mat until this past week – keeping him out of CV’s Inland Empire wrestling tournament, where he would have been a returning champion after winning at 135 last year.

“It’s been hard, not being able to do any cardio work to keep myself in shape,” he said. “I’ve been using a hand bike to try to do the best I can, but it’s not the same thing. I’ve just got to be careful. It’s hard though, because when I shoot for a takedown, that’s the knee I drop to.”

His first match of the season was to have been Wednesday at Ferris, but that match, as well as Thursday’s match at Mead, was canceled by inclement weather.

Whether he would attempt to wrestle at this weekend’s Tri-State tournament in Coeur d’Alene, was up in the air as well.

“I know I’m not in wrestling shape,” he said. “And Tri-State is not the kind of tournament where you want to try to wrestle when you’re not ready.”

Giampietri knows his grandson will do what it takes to compete. He already has.

“He has a tremendous drive to accomplish something he wants,” he said. “He wanted to play football and he made himself into a football player.”

Tyler comes by that drive naturally, he said.

“His dad was very competitive,” he said. “He was a motocross rider and a good one until he broke his wrist and couldn’t get it to heal properly. And his mom has a stubborn streak in her too – I guess you could say (Tyler) gets it from both sides.”