Kingsland No Longer ‘The Land of No Chance’
Camden County wrestling coach Jess Wilder remembers a conversation he had with an Atlanta-area coach when he was considering taking the wrestling coach position at the Kingsland school.
“I was at a coaches clinic when I told a North Georgia coach that I was going to take the position of wrestling coach down at Camden County High School, and he told me that this area was known as the ‘Land of No Chance,’” Wilder recalls. “He told me that the schools in our area usually didn’t win championships.”
Unfazed, Wilder took over the Wildcats wrestling program in 2006. But he does admit that it had been a long time since Camden County had much success on the mat.
“When I started that 2006-2007 season, our last top-10 finish was eighth as a team in 2003, and our last state championship was in 1984,” Wilder says. “I knew we had work to do.”
Wilder says he wasn’t sure what approach would work best. He knew Camden County had athletes, but that didn’t mean they were all meant to wrestle.
“A lot of kids I recruited in that first year didn’t come back for year two,” he admits.
That’s when Wilder decided to try something different.
“I stopped trying to recruit only the top athletes and instead started looking for kids with low body fat, but who weren’t involved with other sports, and tried turning them into wrestlers,” he says. “We began looking for kids without an identity and tried to give them one as a wrestler.”
Wilder says that while a few wrestlers also were great athletes in other sports, “Most of them became great wrestlers through hard work and commitment, not necessarily genetics. We had to change the culture, the mentality of the kids, and our technique. It took us a couple of years to get our system in place and our wrestlers good enough to begin competing for state championships.”
It worked.
In 2008, two years after Wilder arrived at Camden County, Stephen Spradlin won the first traditional state championship in Camden County wrestling since Johnny Simon did so in 1984. Camden was now competing for state titles, with top-3 finishes in 2009, 2010, and 2011.
Then, in 2012, the Camden wrestling team won its first-ever state team title – a pivotal moment, for sure. After runner-up finishes the next couple of years, Wilder’s wrestlers would win the state title again in 2015, and they haven’t stopped since.
That 2015 victory began a streak of nine straight state titles, including this season, with Camden County defeating Buford in the Class 7A state finals.
Georgia Grappler, a media site that covers Georgia high school wrestling summed it up nicely: “The 2023 class 7A state duals [team] finals between Buford and Camden was the best wrestling environment I’ve seen in years … a great showing by both fan bases.”
