Kapaun wrestler Michael Spangler builds on success with family in his corner

At age 2, Michael Spangler told his parents he wanted to be a wrestler. Traci and Louis Spangler looked at each other and told him he couldn’t wrestle in diapers.

Quickly he traded his pull-ups for a singlet.

“That day he potty-trained himself,” Louis said.

Wrestling was destined to be Michael’s first love. His dad wrestled in high school, and his mom grew up in a wrestling household. His uncles are Tim and Jim Dryden, who now coach at Kapaun and Campus respectively.

Tim signed on to be the Crusaders’ wrestling coach 20 years ago. He only planned to coach for four. With years of success, individual titles and City League championships, Dryden is still in the corner.

And now it’s Michael’s corner.

After Dryden’s first year at Kapaun, he hired Louis to be his assistant. After 19 years together, Dryden and Spangler are coaching one of the most accomplished wrestlers in Kansas, who also happens to be family. Michael said he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’m sure you could ask any athlete if they could pick a couple of people to be their coach, they would choose at least one person that’s related to them,” he said. “So it’s awesome knowing I have two people who have coached me my whole life.”

Michael has lost two matches in the past two seasons. He is a two-time Class 5A individual champion and has already started to receive college offers and letters from Division I programs. Statistically, he is one of the best wrestlers in Kapaun history.

But there was a time when Spangler wasn’t among the best in Kansas or even his team. At his first high school weigh-in, he registered at 86 pounds, 20 pounds below the smallest weight class. Spangler wrestled around that weight throughout his first year at Kapaun and finished the year with as many losses as wins.

“Probably the worst year of my life, honestly, wrestling-wise,” Spangler said. “There’s all these kids that win a bunch of youth state titles and then don’t ever have success at the high school level. I wondered, ‘Am I gonna be one of these kids or am I gonna figure it out?’ ”

He needed to get bigger, but his metabolism worked too quickly. That, too, was in his blood. When the Dryden coaches were high schoolers at North, they couldn’t even compete as freshmen – they were too light.

The twins weighed 128 pounds combined and, by minimum weight requirements in Kansas, were held out of all matches. But as Michael did, they worked to get bigger and by the end of their high school careers, they had combined for several state championships.

Spangler’s road to success in high school started on the pavement. Every other day Louis took his son to the street outside their house and had him push a Ford Ranger pickup 50 yards up and 50 yards down 10 times.

“And he had his sister steering it,” Louis said.

Spangler got bigger, and as he did, he got better.

Now wrestling in the 120-pound weight class, he said has has the ability to “enforce my will” on any opponent, and he showed it Wednesday night in his final dual meet against Carroll.

Spangler pinned his opponent within the first minute of the first period, jogged off the mat and put his street clothes on without breaking a sweat. Kapaun went on to win 36-33 to cap the seniors’ perfect 4-0 record against their crosstown rivals.

Louis said his son is “leaps and leaps” better than he ever was in his wrestling career, which makes him “an extremely proud father.”

Traci said Louis and Michael’s relationship has blossomed since his freshman year. Whether it’s spending hours talking about tactics or relating fishing stories to life lessons in the wrestling room, the father-son connection has helped throughout high school.

But Louis has almost always been in Michael’s corner, and even when he couldn’t be, Traci was.

When Michael was 5, the family drove to Tulsa for a tournament. After losing his first match, Michael found his mom outside the locker room. She told him she would spank him if he didn’t start winning.

He won the next two.

Michael has had that fire to succeed since then, Traci said. And that makes sense with the Dryden name to uphold.

“I like being the hunted,” Tim said. “I want teams to come up and give you their best shot every week.”

Michael said he thinks he performs better with the pressure.

“Pressure is either gonna bring out the best or the worst, so you might as well choose for it to bring out your best,” Michael said. “I don’t wanna not be like my uncles or like my dad or like my cousin or like all the rest of my family.

“So I might as well win.”

Michael is off to college soon, and Louis said he knows that too well, as a dad first and a coach second.

Louis is a manager at a cable company during the day and comes to coach in the late afternoons and early evenings.

He said getting to watch his son go on to have the success he has had has made him feel grateful just be able to watch from the corner.

“This is bar-none the best job in the world,” Louis said. “This is his senior year, and he doesn’t know it, but it’s gonna be tough on me. I started coaching when he was 3, and even when I was in the corner, he was sitting there next to me.

“I still have pictures of him just sitting there, and now I’m coaching him.”

This story was originally published January 18, 2018 at 2:05 PM with the headline "Kapaun wrestler Michael Spangler builds on success with family in his corner."