By Mike Finn

            “I was supposed to be happily married and coaching a nationally-ranked wrestling program back in Seattle, not living in bachelor hell and babysitting a ragtag team in a Southern California barrio so filled with gunfire parents forbade their kids to walk home from school.”

— Scott Glabb, Introduction from “A Saint in the City: Coaching Disadvantaged Kids to be Champions”

The wrestling coach and author from Santa Ana High School near Los Angeles does not consider himself a saint.

            But Scott Glabb admitted, “It takes one to do this.”

            Yet after spending over 20 year at this public school, where most of his wrestlers are primarily underprivileged Hispanic teenagers, Glabb believes he is where his faith directed him.

            “I was wondering (to God), ‘When are you going to open some other doors here for me,’ and he hasn’t,” said Glabb. “I’ve never been offered a job anywhere else so I’m thinking God put me here for the time being and I look at it as my calling.”

            Glabb said he would like all of his athletes to act like saints and uses the school’s nickname as an acronym for the wrestlers to follow.

            “S for sacrifice, A for attitude, I for integrity, N is for no quitting and T is for trustworthiness,” he said. “I want to instill values in kids that I grew up with and say, ‘Now, go out and be a saint in our city. Go out and help somebody and not ask for anything in return.’ ”

            Last year, the native of Vancouver, Wash., shared in the book about his experiences coaching wrestling at a school that was built in 1889, making it the oldest high school in Orange County, and a community where only 56 percent of its residents have a high school diploma.

            “I’m a guy who doesn’t want any regrets,” he said. “I want to do everything that my heart desires. I want people out there to know what these kids are going through. When we walk out on the mat, our opponents know that we are a tough team and if they wrestle a Santa Ana kid, they know it’s going to be a tough match and give them everything that they’ve got.

            “But they don’t know if that kid is living in a garage. They don’t know if that kid gets slapped around. They don’t know if that kid has been molested. They don’t know anything about the trials and tribulations just to get them on that mat and how hard it was to get them out there.”

            Compared to the nearly 800 high schools that compete in wrestling in California, his Santa Ana program could hardly be ranked among the best schools in the state. Since taking over the program in 1990 — when he was “the only one who applied for the job”— the Saints have never featured a state champion and only 11 former wrestlers have earned 13 placements over the past two decades. (Only one of Glabb’s wrestlers, 112-pound Sammy Cano, this year is ranked in California.)

            But yet over 120 kids come out for wrestling each year; much different than in 1990 when only 30 kids participated — many as a physical education elective — and lost 72-0 in his first dual meet.

            “I think they come because they think this Glabb guy cares,” said the 47-year-old, who was so passionate about helping these kids that he did not get married until later in his life. (He and his wife, Andrea, have two children, Cameron, 5, and Logan, 3.)

            “I think I’m pretty funny. I crack a lot of jokes. We also take them a lot of places. Every Christmas, I take them on a team trip. We went to Oregon this past year and they had a blast. I don’t charge them. I fund raise for all of this.”

            Glabb, who wrestled for Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Wash., in the early 1980s, admitted he needed the kids as much as they needed him and the experience helped him deal with his own psychological depression that led him to suicidal thoughts about the same time he became a born-again Christian at the age of 13.

            “I really needed to find hope again,” he said. “I really felt hopeless when I was depressed. I didn’t have any real direction. I loved wrestling but I was more consumed with the thoughts of suicide. I don’t wish that on anybody. I wish I was kicked in the crotch every day than to go through the mental anguish that I went through on a daily basis.”

            That was then and this is now and Glabb believes that nearly 80 percent of his wrestlers have succeeded in life since leaving the program; basically the same percentage Glabb illustrated in ten of the chapters that focus on young men who competed for him during his first ten years at Santa Ana.

     (You can read the rest of this article by subscribing to WIN Magazine. Either contact our office at 1-888-305-0606 or subscribe through this website by selecting the “Subscribe” section on our front page.)