Hall of Fame coach Terry Waters has been coaching prep wrestling for nearly half a century, most recently at Fishburne Military School in Waynesboro.
Every year after the season for the past 10 years, Waters and his wife, Sonja, would talk about the future.
“She always says, if you still want to do it, then do it. Coaches and friends and former wrestlers always ask, how much longer are you going to coach? My response has always been, one more year,” said Waters, who was inducted into the Virginia chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2022.
One more year “turned into 49 years,” said Waters, a Harrisburg, Pa., native who started his career in wrestling as a student at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa., where he wrestled for Hall of Fame coach Carl Rhodes and was co-captain of the wrestling team as a senior.
After getting his degree at Lincoln University in Philadelphia, Waters got his first coaching job in Pennsylvania in 1977, before moving to Virginia, where he coached at the former Robert E. Lee High School in Staunton, and also at Riverheads and Fort Defiance in Augusta County, before taking the job at FMS in 2015.
After a career win-loss record of 532-98 across his 49 years as a wrestling coach, Waters has decided, it’s time.
“There was something I always knew deep down, there would be no set timetable, I’d just wake up one morning and say, it’s time. And that is exactly how it happened,” said Waters, who will continue at Fishburne as the athletics director.
My first question to Waters, after he shared the news with me earlier this week: will you miss coaching?
“Chris, you must be the 100th person, including my wife and twin brother, that has asked that question. You don’t coach as long as I have and say you won’t miss it entirely,” Waters said. “I’ve always been a competitive person from as young as I can remember. That’s the way it is growing up in the projects. I’ll miss the game day matches and most of the preparation in the practice room. I’ll certainly miss my coaching staff and those coaches I looked across the mat to compete with. Wrestling coaches, for some reason, have an unspoken membership that is lifelong. I’ll remain a part of that. I won’t miss the long weekend road trips, or the nightly grind of practice.
“In short, Chris, I’m happy stepping down, and excited to step into a new chapter of my life,” Waters said.
And here I think I’ve been around forever. My first job in journalism was part-time sportswriter at The News Virginian, the former daily newspaper here in town, that’s now pretty much a newspaper-in-name-only, starting out in 1995 with a notebook and a lot of $15-per-story assignments on the local high school beat.
Waters was at Fort Defiance High School back then – and not that the young reporter in me would have thought about it, but he’d already been in coaching for 18 years when I first covered one of his team’s meets.
Thirty-one years later, the young reporter who covered the local high schools has a gray beard, and Waters is just now hanging it up.
Next question: memories.
“It’s not all team or individual championships,” Waters said, mentioning, among others, one former wrestler who worked from the youth club to a spot on varsity, another who wanted to quit early in his freshman season who went on to become a two-time district champ and state runnerup, and college All-American.
“It’s the relationships with people that I’ll remember most, from former wrestlers and wrestler parents who run into me and still call me Coach. Coach and Pop are beautiful words,” Waters said.
He’ll still get those interactions as the AD at Fishburne, a private military prep school here in town.
“As AD, I’ll be doing what athletics directors do, and that is manage the entire athletic department in all phases of the position. While obviously I’ll be in athletics on the other side, I will still be able to interact with the students, so my love for youth and trying to steer them the right way will still be in play,” Waters said.
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Chris Graham
