BLUE EARTH — Jack Eustice stood in a room in his Blue Earth home filled with pictures, trophies, and a case containing Blue Earth Area wrestling memorabilia and more trophies on Tuesday afternoon. The pictures, plaques and paraphernalia spilled into the hallway, decorating the nearest wall.

The former Blue Earth Area High School Bucs head wrestling coach then pulled out a picture frame showing pictures of kids progressing from when he’d coached them in elementary school to the high school level.

“My one goal after a while was that I wanted to coach the same kid (kindergarten) through 12th grade,” Eustice said.

In his 22 years of coaching, Eustice compiled a 263-87-4 record, a Class AA state championship and six team section titles, while also coaching under 18 individual state champions. Seven of those titles are shared between his two sons, Luke (3) and Ty (4), both of whom went on to wrestle at the University of Iowa.

Because of this, the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and Minnesota Chapter will award Jack Eustice the lifetime service award at the Hall of Fame Banquet on April 22 in Austin. He is already in the Minnesota State University Mavericks’ Hall of Fame (1994) as well as the Division II Wrestling Hall of Fame (2004).

Eustice got his start in 1978 after Dick Maher stepped away from coaching the Bucs’ wrestling team. Maher doubled as the athletic director and wrestling coach for a while, but then decided to focus solely on being the athletic director. Conveniently at that time, there was also an opening for a social studies teacher at the school. As a result, Eustice took both jobs.

“Blue Earth had a great wrestling tradition,” Eustice said. “There weren’t a lot of social studies-wrestling coach type of openings, but they were one. I had two interviews and Blue Earth was one. They offered me the job.”

Although Maher was no longer on the wrestling coaching staff, he was still a source of help for Eustice.

“As I look back, he didn’t try to tell me what to do, but we were around each other so much, he snuck it in. It was only when he got older that he tried to tell me what to do,” Eustice said, laughing.

He also learned a great deal from his college coach, Rometo “Rummy” Macias.

“(Macias) was a very unique guy. … He was more than just about coaching wrestling — he was all about what you’re going to do after this,” Eustice said.

Ironically, Maher was posthumously inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, and Macias is in the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame.

When first starting out as a coach, Eustice thought that his days as a wrestler would help him as a coach. But he soon discovered that knowledge alone wasn’t enough.

“I think it’s worth something having all the knowledge. But if you have to pick between passion and knowledge and you want to hire people, I’d go with passion,” he said. “You can learn what you need to learn.”

In his first year, Eustice coached current BEA assistant wrestling coach Dave Pfaffinger, who allowed Eustice success right away.

“He was a state champion that year, so he was the first state champion I’d ever coached,” Eustice said of Pfaffinger.

Other individual champions include his two sons, Luke and Ty, both of whom have awards and trophies in the “wrestling room,” too. One of Jack’s most memorable moments was when both of his sons won individual state titles in the same year, 1999. In 2001, Ty was part of the Bucs’ state championship team, in addition to winning the 145-pound state title in his senior year.

“You don’t want to force sports on kids … (but) I really wanted them to wrestle,” Jack Eustice laughed. “We wouldn’t have had a good team with just those two guys; we had to get their buddies involved. They had some good buddies, so that helps.”

But once Ty graduated and joined Luke at Iowa, Jack decided to step away from coaching and became the principal of Blue Earth Area High School. It allowed he and his wife, Mona, the flexibility they needed to watch their sons wrestle in college.

“We didn’t want to miss their college careers and I’d gotten my administrative degree,” Jack Eustice said. “It seemed like a good change at the time.”

In 2012, the Eustice patriarch became the superintendent at Nicollet High School. He still gets his fill of wrestling, though. Turn to KBEW’s radio during the wrestling season and you can hear Eustice doing play-by-play at the Bucs’ wrestling meets with Steve Frederickson.

“Steve was our junior high wrestling coach for 20, 25 years. It’s fun just reconnecting with him, with wrestling again,” Eustice said.

Off the air, Eustice is a wealth of wrestling knowledge. He can remember when current Bucs head coach Randy Wirtjes was wrestling at Elmore High School while also assessing current area wrestlers like Fairmont/Martin County West Red Bulls 106-pounder Jaxson Rohman.

“I haven’t seen him get beat yet, so we’ll see,” Eustice said in reference to Rohman.

On April 22, Eustice will get another piece of hardware as the newest inductee into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Although Eustice’s room of achievements is filled, there’s certainly space for one more.