MATTHEW BURNETTE, Staff Writer

Randall Jennings started Ground Zero Wrestling in March of 2024 to help some local wrestlers get extra practice time in and to offer a program for some of Manchester’s youth.

Now, not even a year later, he’s already seeing results from those efforts.

“It’s really awesome just to get to sit back and think about where we were at the beginning of the year and watch the process take place,” said Jennings. “These kids … show up day in and day out and put the work in and stay dedicated to their craft and see their improvements that they’ve made over the course of a year. It’s just amazing for me to watch, and I’m lucky to be able to do it.”

Ground Zero focuses on Freestyle and Grecco wrestling during the summer with its advanced group of middle and high school wrestlers and won the 2024 TN USA Wrestling Award for Club of the Year.

The club also has an AAU youth program for children from ages 4 to eighth grade. Jennings said that he hopes as the AAU season wraps up they might score an award for the club.

Twenty-six AAU wrestlers from Ground Zero advanced to the regional tournament where 21 placed in the top 4 and got the chance to compete at the State level.

Ground Zero was originally based at Jenning’s home before expanding to its current location on Hillsboro Blvd in the same building as Metro Industrial Services.

“It started out as just kind of a small extra thing we were doing in my garage with just a few dedicated high school athletes just trying to get some extra work and give them opportunities,” said Jennings. “Then we just kind of saw a need for it in the area and the need for a youth program and a need for our high school students to have another outlet and everything,”

Jennings wrestled for the Coffee County Central High School team in its first four years of existence. He then wrestled for two years at MTSU before moving into coaching at his alma mater.

“During my second year at MTSU, Coach (Roger) Barlow, who was my high school coach, hit me up and kind of let me know that he had to step aside and the program needed somebody to step in and help out,” he said. “I coached at the high school level for about ten years at Coffee County, and then him and I started a youth club there.”

Though the wrestlers at Ground Zero are trained to succeed in their sport, Jennings hopes that all of his wrestlers take away important life skills as well.

“We want to be great in wrestling, but more so the lessons we learn off the mat and just being good people and good humans,” said Jennings on what he wants to impart on his wrestlers. “I think that’s kind of lost these days, so re-instilling that, and then in the last couple of years we started to put some of our kids into college.”

Jennings explained that there is a “wall of fame” at their gym of wrestlers who have gone from Ground Zero to college.

“We’ve got about 15 athletes now that are spread across Division 2, Division 3 in multiple collegiate programs, so giving our kids the chance to continue their education and get that for free while they’re doing something they love is a great thing too,” he added.

Expansion is hopefully in the cards for Ground Zero with the ultimate goal being a dedicated building for the club with mat space, showers, and locker rooms, but Jennings says they want to focus on their work at the moment.

“That’s still a good ways off, but for right now it’s just kind of continuing to do what we’ve been doing the last couple of years and just continuing to grow,” he explained. “Each year we’ve had good numbers of growth, so if we can just continue to do that and get more kids involved in wrestling, then I’ll be extremely happy.”

Jennings, who was born and raised in Coffee County, says he’s been surprised at the amount of people that he encounters around town that isn’t aware that the high school even has a wrestling program.

“It’s crazy the people that don’t know that we’re here still. I feel like we do a good job of advertising on Facebook and stuff, but we still get a lot of people that don’t even know wrestling’s a thing around here, so there’s that side of it,” he explained. “Once people discover it and everything, our group of parents and supporters that we have, we always talk about how it’s a family.”

At a recent practice, Jennings says that a couple of moms of some of the wrestlers helped out by watching after his son who was in attendance and enjoys warming up and jumping on the wrestlers for fun. He also gave credit to his fellow coaches at Ground Zero.

“With our AAU club, I would not be able to do that without the help of a great group of coaches that we have,” remarked Jennings. “Seth McCulloch is one of our main guys that’s always in the room helping out. Shane Scribner is another guy that’s been there all season with us. Luca Marin, Josh Mainville, Cory Smith, Zane Johnston.”

He also said that the high school wrestlers take time to help mentor the younger wrestlers in the group.

“We have our AAU group first and then later on our high school group practices, and we’ve got a really good core group of high school athletes like Will Barlow, Eli McLean, and Jasmine Norris that come out every single day to AAU and spend an extra hour with our little group before they get back out there and compete again.”

“I couldn’t do it without all the help I have,” he added.