You wouldn’t know that Joe Cumby Sr., 68, went to a Catholic school as a child. He stands 5’10,’’ broad shouldered and bald headed with a long white beard and blue eyes, but the thing one tends to notice the most about him is that every visible square inch of his skin is tattooed with everything from skulls, daggers, snakes, dragons, and spiders to a “Happy Monster” drawing that his grandchild, Trinity Cumby, 11, made in kindergarten. 

In Collingdale High School, Cumby wrestled in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade and played football from the age of six. When he became an adult and had children of his own, he knew he wanted to coach.This is what he had to say in a deep, booming voice, about the current state of the wrestling program in Coudersport:

“We’re not a wrestling team anymore. They had a coach, they had a damn good coach,” he said, “Dirk Cowburn, Coudersport State Champ in 2008-9, something like that. When contacted by email, Cowburn said, “I enjoyed the few years that I coached at Coudersport high school, I had a lot of support from the school. Also, Cody Bova and Chris Rushmore did a really good job last year with the JO program. They got the Coudersport Youth Tournament back as well as got a lot of numbers, which is a great thing. I have always wanted to have my own wrestling club, which is why I left the head coaching position at Coudersport, and I’m really looking forward to continuing to help my athletes at Cowburn Wrestling Compound.”

Cumby continued, “The junior wrestling program turned to crap…There’s no incentive…I coached junior wrestling here (in 2001-2003), and we went from the first year, having 25 kids for JO (Junior Olympic) wrestling, to 80 kids the next year. And it’s because we got into the elementary school and we showed them what wrestling was about…we would take the kids trophies, and when you walk in, there’s a showcase, and they would make a display of the trophies, week to week. When they won trophies, the rest of the school would see them…and they would say, “That one’s mine,” and then the other kids would want to wrestle. That’s how you build a program. It’s incentive based. It’s not parent based.” 

And that’s what mattered, Cumby said. Kids wanting to win trophies and get better and better, so that they could be proud of themselves.

“When you’re six, seven, eight, nine years old, to be recognized, that’s enough, right? Your parents are happy, they’re proud of you, and it all comes down to that,” said Cumby.

Cumby had implemented this program because he has three sons, who are now Joe Jr., 39, Zach, 33, and Jarrett, 27. Joe Jr. changed his focus from football to wrestling in the ninth grade. “He was a bear on the football field,” said Cumby. When Joe Jr. started wrestling, Cumby said with some pride, the coach told him that he had taken to wrestling like “a duck does to water.” 

Zach Cumby started wrestling when he was five years old, and went on  to the Junior Olympic State Championship when he was in fifth and sixth grade, and Joe Jr. went to the regionals. Zach Cumby went on to play college football in Ohio for two years as a starting running back. 

Cumby remembers, “Zach’s deal was, when he was in eighth grade, he didn’t want to wrestle anymore, and he was afraid to tell me. When I finally had him in the truck with me, I said, ‘What are you going to do this year?’ He said he didn’t want to wrestle, and I said ‘That’s fine.’” 

Cumby regaled this reporter with several stories, including one in which his son Zach had that “special knack”–he knew what the other team was going to do before it happened. So he was always right there to make the tackle. Cumby went on to say that after school and in-between meals, he would take his sons to the gym to get “bigger and stronger.” And that’s what it takes, he says to make a child into an athlete. That and a program.

Cumby mentioned that Paul Simcoe coached boys for over 30 years in Coudersport, taking teams to the District Nine and beyond, to the Semi-Finals in the State Championships.

When contacted, Simcoe wrote in an email that he “Agree[d] with most of the concepts and beliefs in [Cumby’s] statement…If you don’t have discipline and respect for yourself or others you severely limit your chance for success. The hard work, goal setting, adversity, and relationships you encounter in sports with your teammates and coaches will follow you in your adult life and make way for you to be a successful and productive family person and also be a positive member of your community. We all need more of these qualities in our society today. Life lessons [are] definitely more important than wins and losses.”

Cumby continued, “He had a program for them, and that’s what it’s all about. They have to be trained. Repetition in sports is very important. Because then it creates muscle memory.”

Muscle memory, Cumby said, can be explained as feeling what you need to do when it is the exact time to do it. “You don’t even have to think, and all of a sudden, it’s going to be done, and that’s why we practice. It’s the same in football.”

Cumby said that he only coached for a couple of years in Coudersport because the parents didn’t like “their little babies being turned into men.” Cumby choked up when he told this reporter that after the wrestling program was done and overwith, he had kids come up to him as adults on the street to thank him, and he was touched by that. “I’m not doing this for the parents. I wasn’t. And that’s why I stopped.”

Cumby said that all of the kids were good, if they could put up with him. They were good kids and they didn’t quit, he said. There was one time, Cumby remembered, when they took the teenaged football players in around 1975, including the cheerleaders, to Florida, and, “We beat the crap out of Satellite Beach,” and two of the boys got into some trouble. 

It was the last day at the Magic Kingdom, and this was even before Epcot Center, and Cumby heard his name being called over the loudspeaker to be summoned to one of the stores. Security was there, and Cumby didn’t know what was going on, but he soon found out that two of his kids had shoplifted some merchandise. The children were released to Cumby, but the two kids were asked to leave the Magic Kingdom. Outside, there were some benches, and, sitting on the benches, Cumby asked the boys, “What the f–k are you doing? Who caught you?” 

Cumby, now, chuckling, remembered that the kids shamefully told him that Goofy was the one who had caught them. Cumby started laughing and teasing the boys, calling them “lame”and they laughed too, and “I laughed all the way back to Pennsylvania,” he said with a smile. 

To his knowledge, the boys never got into any trouble after that.

After reminiscing, when asked how one does this, how one builds this sort of confidence in a child, Cumby gets serious, and said that every season, he would have what he called his “little speech,” and it went something like this: 

“Most of you are not gonna wrestle after high school. What you put into this, that’s what you’ll get out of this. When you work hard and you try your hardest at this level, and wrestle in high school–and I don’t care if you win or lose–you make that other guy know that you were there. I’m building you for life, because when you get out of high school and you gotta go to work, and there’s gonna to be bosses that are just a pain in the butt, but you’re going to have a strong enough mind to say, I’m making money. I don’t know him. He doesn’t matter to me. I just gotta do what I got to do. And that’s when they come up to me and say, ‘You were right, Coach. You were right,’ years later. Wrestling is a life lesson. 

So is football. 

Cumby added, “If they put hard work and effort into it, and get results and personal goals back, they’re going to be fine the rest of their lives.”

When asked if the parents thought he was too hard on them, Cumby said that he would say to the boys, “Don’t quit because it’s too hard. If you quit now, you’re gonna quit later. 

I made it hard. 

There was a purpose to it. 

Because when it’s the third period, and when the other guy is tired and you’re tired, but you say, ‘F–k you’ and go, you win, right? Even if you lose, you win, because you knew you did your best. It’s common sense.”

When asked what it all boils down to, Cumby says, in his deep, rumbly voice that was then cracking with emotion, “It’s not about winning, ” he said, with tears in his eyes, looking down. He then looked up, straight ahead with clear, direct eyes, and choked out, “It’s about your guts,  he said, making a fist against his chest. “It’s about pride…There’s no pride.”

It’s apparent and obvious that Cumby loves and misses coaching. He started coaching in his senior year of high school. But he won’t go back, he says, because of the local parents. The parents don’t want their little boys to be treated like they’re going to grow up to be men. 

Frank Brown, current coach of the Coudersport Falcons High School football team, could not be reached for comment by press time.

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