For a fellow who was a pioneer - though often overlooked - of the tradition-rich Prairie wrestling program, early coach Darrell Bogner is characteristically honest and humble.

“I didn’t know crap about the sport, especially when I started,” says the longtime industrial arts teacher, who came to the high school in its infancy in 1963 and retired in 1991.

Bogner began the 7th and 8th grade wrestling teams at Prairie (quite by accident) and coached them for 17 years.

“In those days,” he explains, “We had a lot of good, strong farm kids. They were tough as nails, and they hardly ever lost.”

In his career of bouncing back and forth from head junior high coach to assistant, his boys posted a 135-16 record.

And many of them, like Barry Davis and the Zalesky brothers, Jim and Larry, went on to establish a mat legacy on the Prairie varsity.  Bogner, who turns 80 this month, is perhaps better known for starting the high school  tennis program back in 1964.

He coached girls and boys for three years, then kept on with the boys for 31 more, even staying seven years after he left the classroom.  During that time, eight of his players moved to the state tournament.  His best, Mitch Brunscheen, was runner-up twice.

But Bogner, himself an accomplished tennis player who only quit the game a few years ago following two knee replacements, admits he never matched the coaching success he’d had with raw, young wrestlers.

“I loved coaching tennis,” he says. “When we started, we had four courts but only two of them were playable.  So, for the first four years all of our meets were on the road.

“Over all those 34 years, I bet we lost 70 percent of our matches. But nobody cared whether we won or lost.  And we had a lot of fun.”

Once, early on when he was trying to build both wrestling and tennis programs, a parent came to him with a question.

“Why,” the father asked, “do you know everything about tennis, but you never win? You don’t know anything about wrestling, but your teams win all the time.”

As he does a lot, Bogner laughs about the memory.

He had absolutely no notion of being in on the beginnings of a dynasty when he arrived at Prairie.  A native of Burlington, he was a one-man jack of-all-trades at tiny Sperry High School for two years after his 1957 graduation from Western Illinois University.  He then spent four years at slightly-less-tiny Riverside, where he taught, was drivers education director and acting principal, coached all sports and drove the school bus.

When the school merged with Ainsworth to form Highland Community, he moved up to what was then known by some as Cow Pie High on the south edge of Cedar Rapids.

“I wanted to have something, anything to do with sports,” he recalls. “So I was put in charge of after-school activities two days a week for 5th and 6th graders.  That first year, we had flag football in the fall, basketball in the winter and dodgeball in the spring.”

He thought dodgeball was sort of a wimpy activity.  So he asked new Prairie head wrestling coach Bob Mellgren, his neighbor in the nearby Lincolnway housing development, to teach him something about wrestling.

“On his living room floor, Bob showed me seven holds. Two take-downs, two pins and three escapes,” Bogner says.  “I showed ‘em to the kids, and they just ate it up. We had a couple of matches, and they never had so much fun.”

The novice grapplers put on an exhibition for the PTA in the original high school gym.  And that’s how the junior high wrestling program got its start.

“Bob was a linebacker at Iowa State, and he really knew wrestling,” according to Bogner. “He made it into a big program at Prairie.

“He told me that take-downs were the best way to score points, so that’s what we spent most of the time practicing on. And a lot of years we went undefeated.”

His method of motivating the tykes was pretty simple.  If they lost, the next day he’d have them run 150 laps around the balcony track in the old gymnasium.

“They didn’t like to lose,” he points out.

At one point, Prairie brought in young college wrestling champion Ron James to run the junior high team.  His first two squads were 4-4 and 5-3. Then he was drafted into the Army for two years.

“I’d been his assistant,” the old coach explains. “They asked me if I’d take over again, and I said only if they couldn’t find anybody else.  That was a mistakes ‘cause they quit looking.”

His next teams went 6-2 and 7-1. When James returned, the team was 6-2.

“I told Ron, ‘Why did you have to come back and screw everything up.'"

In the end, Bogner takes no credit for Prairie High School later becoming the home of All-American wrestlers.  He’s just tickled to have been part of it.

“I had so much fun coaching and teaching,” he says, “that it’s ridiculous.”