Grief still weighs on Wichita East star wrestler, but so does his title pursuit
Wrestling doesn’t care about why you step on the mat.
It doesn’t care what kind of week you had. It doesn’t care how old you were when grief first found you. It doesn’t care that some losses in life don’t fit nearly into words, especially when you’re 16 and still trying to understand what the world can take from you.
By the time Wichita East junior Donnie Jackson reaches the center circle, all of that is stripped away. There is only his training and his will.
And Jackson has become overwhelming with both.
He enters this weekend’s Class 6A state wrestling tournament in Overland Park as one of the most dangerous wrestlers in the field, a 157-pound force with a 40-4 record after earning Wrestler of the Year honors at the regional tournament where he had pins in 28, 23 and 46 seconds wrapped around a 19-3 technical fall.
But the numbers don’t explain this season. Not at East. Not for Jackson.
Before the season began, East wrestling was shaken by tragedy when head coach Kenny Taylor Jr. died by suicide in November. Taylor was not just Jackson’s high school coach. He had been part of Jackson’s life since Jackson was 6 years old, when he was a novice wrestler learning the sport at Team of Hard Knox, the Wichita wrestling club run by Charles Knox and Taylor.
The grief that followed has not left. It has simply changed shape.
Some days Jackson can carry it. Some days it carries him.
And somehow, through it all, he has become the centerpiece of the best East wrestling team in decades.
This is a story about a title chase, yes. But it is also a story about what it means for a teenager to keep moving through grief, to let a team help hold him up and to try to honor a coach by becoming everything that coach saw in him.
Part I: The boy who needed a sport and found a calling
Before Donnie Jackson became a feared wrestler, he was just a kid with energy to burn.
His older cousin, Rontez Grayson, saw that clearly.
Grayson, who helped raise and guide a group of younger cousins in Wichita, wanted to keep them active and pointed in the right direction. Jackson had already shown he was athletic. Football came naturally to him. But when that season ended, Grayson went looking for something to fill the winter.
Basketball was first up.
That experiment didn’t last long.
“He was just really aggressive,” Grayson said laughing. “He was basically just out there fouling and hacking. So I was like, ‘Let’s find you something else to do.”
That same night, Grayson was scrolling Facebook and came across Team of Hard Knox on his phone. It turned out to be the right place at the right time.
What looked like too much aggression in basketball looked like a gift in wrestling.
“I just wanted to keep him busy, so he’s not out there getting into trouble” Grayson said. “Wrestling has helped develop him into a great human being. It teaches you dedication and discipline and to fight through things. That was very important to me. And plus, it’s opened so many doors for him.”
Jackson now talks about wrestling with the language of someone who is deeply in love with the craft. He loves the film study, the technique, the conditioning, the discipline, the constant pursuit of improvement. He loves the competition and the challenge. He loves that wrestling has taken him around the country in the summer to elite tournaments, introducing him to new coaches and new people. He hopes it can take him to college on scholarship one day.
But when he was young, Jackson didn’t feel any of that.
“I didn’t really like the practices very much when I was younger,” Jackson said with a laugh. “But after I won that first tournament, I kept coming back for more.”
After not qualifying for state as a freshman, he came back for more. After he placed sixth at state last year, he came back for more. After the practices got harder, he came back for more.
And this season, he kept coming back for more even when grief made him question whether he wanted to wrestle at all.
Part II: The weight of loss and the choice to keep going
There is no clean way to write about what East’s wrestling program has been through since November.
Taylor’s death stunned the program just before the season began. For Jackson, the pain was deeply personal.
“It was devastating to Donnie to lose a coach who was also a role model for him,” Grayson said. “There was a lot of confusion. And he lost one of his other cousins during that same time, so there were some crazy emotions with all of that.”
Jackson spoke bluntly about his first thoughts after learning the news.
“I was just in shock,” Jackson said. “I honestly didn’t even want to wrestle anymore. It just really hurt.”
Jackson said there have been days this season when the sadness has hit him harder than others. He has not found some magic switch to escape it. He has tried, as many grieving people do, to stay busy and keep moving, but some days the pain breaks through anyway — in practice, in quiet moments, in the middle of an otherwise normal day.
“I try to keep my mind off of it most of the time, but some days I just can’t,” Jackson said. “Some days I will just have a bad practice and just think about it a lot.”
What changed for Jackson, and for East, was not the disappearance of pain. It was what they decided to do while carrying it.
New East coach Tucker Trevett, who had been an assistant coach the previous two years, stepped into a situation no one could fully prepare for. He could not fix what happened. He knew that. But he was not a stranger and that mattered.
“I may not have been the most qualified guy, but what I’ve learned is caring about these kids and who they’re becoming has been the best part of the job,” Trevett said. “It’s been really hard throughout the season with grief and pain. There’s been ups and downs. There’s been pain. But these kids are really good at doing hard things.”
The team’s response has not been about pretending everything is OK. It has been about staying connected to one another and choosing, over and over, to keep moving forward.
“At the very beginning of the year, everyone had a decision to make about whether we were going to live in the tragedy or let it transform us,” Trevett said. “That doesn’t mean you forget about it, but you don’t live in it. They all made the choice that they still want to be great and their success has become contagious.”
After initially wanting to walk away, Jackson was persuaded to come back and dedicate this season to honoring Taylor. Not replacing the sadness. Not outrunning it. Honoring him through the work.
“I want to do better for him,” Jackson said. “I’m trying to win it all for him.”
That’s the way Jackson can best honor his former coach and mentor.
“You’ve got to value good people and show them respect by going out there and fighting your hardest out there on that mat,” Grayson said. “He can honor him by getting good grades, staying out of trouble and wrestling his best. That’s how you pay it back. I know coach Taylor wanted Donnie to continue to be successful, so that’s why he does it now.”
That purpose has not removed the grief. It has given Jackson a direction to point it. And he has not had to do it alone.
Jackson says being around teammates — friends who are living through the same painful season in their own ways — has helped lift him on some of the hardest days. There is a closeness in the East practice room that feels earned.
The wrestlers joke. They hang out. They stay over at each other’s houses. They do Bible studies together. They know how to have fun and when to lock in.
“We’re all pretty close,” East senior Jordan Noble said. “We all hang out outside of wrestling, so we like to do things together other than just wrestling.”
Jackson feels that support when the weight gets heavy.
“Sometimes when I’m feeling down or something heavy is weighing on me, they help pick me up,” Jackson said. “Those guys help push me to work harder.”
Part III: A star chasing a title and a team chasing history
It is quite the show to watch Jackson wrestle this season.
Few can match his pace and his pressure. He doesn’t just dominate, he does it with style.
“He’s patient, but he’s relentless,” Trevett said. “When he gets going, it snowballs. He likes to be the hammer, not the nail and he’s puts it on people quick. It’s been a lot of fun to watch.”
Jackson toe through the 6A West bracket last weekend with the kind of dominance that is eye-opening. A 28-second pin. A 23-second pin. A 19-3 technical fall. Then a 46-second pin in the finals.
He enters state with a 40-4 record and his likely toughest challenge is Olathe North senior Blake Samuelson, who beat Jackson twice at the Rocky Welton Invitational in Garden City. Samuelson won the 6A East regional. Jackson won the 6A West regional. Their collison feels like one of the defining potential matchups of the weekend.
But Jackson’s rise is inseparable from East’s rise.
The Blue Aces finished second at the City League tournament, a finish no one around the programs seems to remember in recent history. Jackson was also named the event’s Most Outstanding Wrestler after scoring three straight pins, another feat that cannot be remembered in program history.
“I kind of knew I was going to get it going into the tournament,” Jackson said. “I had the mindset that I was going to wrestle as hard and best as I can to my ability, so they were going to have no choice but to give it to me.”
East placed fifth as a team at the 6A West regional and enters state ranked No. 5 — a significant breakthrough for a program that hasn’t notched a top-10 finish at state since taking ninth in 1995. The Blue Aces haven’t had a top-five finish since 1977. Since the turn of the decade, East has only produced 11 state placers with Adam Knipp (2004) the program’s only state champion in the last four decades.
The Blue Aces are poised to make history with eight wrestlers headed to the state meet. East had four wrestlers in the regional finals, including Jackson, freshman Enrique Tellez Jr. (106), senior Jordan Noble (132) and sophomore Prince Marshall (175). The rest of East’s state qualifiers feature senior Anthony Noble (144), senior Terance Hopson (190), junior Emeory McGlory (120) and sophomore Carter Chadwick (138).
“East High wrestling hasn’t been much for a long time,” Trevett said. “I think all of these kids are excited to be part of the team that is spearheading a change of culture.”
The improved depth in the program has not only helped East with better team results, but it has also helped Jackson’s rapid rise to one of the most dominant wrestlers in Kansas.
Jackson is trying to become the program’s first state champion in more than two decades and he’s taking it seriously.
“It’s not just waking up and relying on talent on a Saturday morning,” Trevett said. “It’s everything he’s doing in advance. It’s the film he’s watching. It’s the way he’s pushing himself when no one is watching. It’s watching what he eats.”
If East makes the kind of push it believes it can make in Overland Park, it will be because a group of wrestlers found a way to stay together through one of the hardest years of their lives. It will be because a first-year head coach in an impossible situation kept showing up for kids he already loved. It will be because a program long removed from its best days decided it was time to change history.
The bracket will not care why Jackson is there this weekend.
But the people around him will know. They will know what he lost. They will know who helped him keep going. They will know who he is trying to honor.
And if Jackson reaches the top of the podium this weekend, the celebration won’t erase the pain. That’s not how grief works.
It will simply be a display of his resolve, proof that even in a season marked by heartbreak, a young wrestler and his team found a way to turn sorrow into purpose and purpose into something that might last at East for a long, long time.
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