By MAYAN PAZ
Tiger Media Network
When Tereus Henry joined the Fort Hays State University wrestling team, he did not imagine how hard the transition from high school to college was going to be.
From a Texas 6A state champion to a freshman in college, the change was difficult. But it’s the athletes who learn how to adapt to the situation — and utilize it to their best advantage — who can find success in college.
Five years later, with two All-American honors in his bag, Henry will graduate from FHSU as one of the most successful wrestlers in the program’s history.
“One of the hardest things is going from being the top guy in high school to coming back down and being one of the worst, as a freshman, and getting your butt kicked every day,” Henry said. “But honestly, I embraced that journey. It kind of made me fall in love with the sport. I was just getting better, having to climb and work towards being the best in the room. I did not anticipate being here this long with the COVID year, but I’m glad I was. It was a good experience, lots of learning, especially these last two years.”
From El Paso, Texas, Henry was a top recruit in high school, winning the state championship his junior year and finishing as a runner-up his senior year. Henry decided not to go to college for wrestling and notified all of the coaches who tried to recruit him.
One by one, those coaches lost interest and gave up on the recruit. But there was one coach who didn’t — Chas Thompson, the FHSU head coach at the time.
“I was set on not wrestling in college anymore, so I told everybody who was interested in recruiting me,” Henry said. “But then Chas Thompson said, ‘Well, before you make that decision, let us take you out on a visit.’ So I came out on a visit, and honestly, I just liked how different it was from my hometown. I’m from El Paso, which is a very big city compared to Hays, so it was just a very different environment going from El Paso to Hays, which I really liked. And I always knew I wanted to go out of state for college. So I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me. Hays is very, very cheap and very affordable. So I figured, why not?”
It worked out well for Henry and the Tigers, who, by insisting on a visit, gained a rising athlete. Henry started from the bench and slowly gained his spot on the team’s roster. In his third year, he achieved his first All-American title, finishing third in the NCAA DII national championships. After struggling with injuries in the last season, Henry just wanted to enjoy his final year as a Tiger, a year in which he finished as a national runner-up — his best collegiate achievement.
The wrestling program saw a change in the head coach position after Henry finished his first year as a Tiger. Erik Wince took charge of the program and led Henry to additional success.
“We saw the potential in him. And the best thing was that he had a good work ethic,” Wince said. “We knew that we were not gonna stay on him about working hard. We’re not going to stay on him about living right. He had great training partners at that time that really helped him blossom. There were obviously some ups and downs, but we just kept staying positive and working on the little things he needed to fix. A lot of it was between the ears and for him to believe in how good he actually could be.”
For Wince, Henry was a solid leader in the locker room to help with the team environment, including mentoring younger wrestlers.
“You take a guy like Tereus — someone that it maybe took him a year or two to get in the groove with college wrestling — but by the end of your career if you buy into the culture that we’re trying to build here and buy into the training and buy into the lifestyle and the nutrition and the work ethic, you can win national titles here,” Wince said. “That’s one thing we tell a lot of recruits, we’ve got guys in this program that weren’t blue-chip recruits coming out of high school. They had some success in high school, and then they had to kind of take a couple of steps back and really surrender themselves to what it takes to be successful at the college level.”
As Henry steps into the next stage of his life, there are some lessons from his wrestling career he will take with him.
“The most important element, I’d say, is that I can do anything I set my mind to,” he said. “I like the old saying I heard in high school that once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy. And I feel like that’s so true because wrestling is so grueling, so tough, and just requires pretty much everything you’ve got if you want to be the best you want to be. So I feel like now that I’ve done that, I can pretty much do anything that I want to set my mind to.”