Jack Gifford Death: Considered the architect of the Brawley Wrestling program, legendary Coach Jack Gifford died away not too long ago. Beginning an effort in 1963, Gifford was the first Brawley Wrestling coach.
Two S.C.I.F. Wrestling State Titles were won by that squad in 1969 and 1970. The coach arrived from Pennsylvania as a Purdue graduate and Big Ten All-American. Not too long ago, Gifford was added to the Brawley Athletics Hall of Fame.
IVP archives show that two personalities crucial to one of the mainstays of the Imperial Valley sporting scene got served their just desserts at a ceremony organized by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame-California on May 2019 at the Laguna Hills Community Centre.
Those numbers belonged to Jack Gifford and David Kreider, respectively the first and second wrestling coaches to cover the mat at Brawley Union High. Each was inducted into the state’s NWOF chapter (the main museum is in Stillwater, Okla.), as lifetime service honorees for “demonstration of [the characteristics of self-discipline, self-reliance and self-confidence] while achieving excellence in the sport as wrestlers [and] coaches.”
According to official ceremony literature, Gifford planted those roots in 1962 and moved to California “on a whim” from Illinois where he had spent nine years teaching and coaching at different schools after earning three varsity letters and twice placing in the Big Ten wrestling championships attending Purdue University.
He had the desert flourishing a few short years later. Soon afterward, Wildcat wrestlers vying for state crowns were in action. Roy Aguilar won it all at 98 pounds just four years into the program’s existence in 1966, making him the first-ever individual champion of the institution. A year later Robert Dowden trailed Aguilar at 115.
Not only did the Wildcats boast an individual state titlist in Gilbert Mendez at 115 pounds in 1969, but they also won the school’s first CIF title by challenging all-comers who turned out to be the best in Southern California. Then they turned around and repeated it in 1970 (with Fidel Torres taking home an individual state title at 98 pounds). Following that, Gifford moved on, travelling to the clearly less arid regions of 90210 where he established a record of 235-70-3 as the program chief at Beverly Hills High from 1971–1987 before resigning from coaching though he remained to teach for several years. Kreider, another exiled Midwesterner, took over when Gifford left the Valley.