Forced to forego freshman season, Stringer wins title

Powell High School freshman Riley Stringer captured the heavyweight title at the Rocky Mountain Nationals wrestling tournament recently in Denver. In doing so, he completed a comeback from a rare condition that forced him to forego almost all of his freshman season on the wrestling mat.

“He’s the first kid in Powell history to go down there and win a national title,” said Powell High School wrestling coach Nate Urbach. “It’s a huge meet. There’s 2,500 competitors. They run it on 20 mats at a time. It’s the biggest wrestling tournament in the Midwest.”

That Stringer was even capable of competing was something that seemed very much in doubt just months earlier.

The teen’s freshman year of high school athletics had been riddled with inactivity. The troubles began early in the football season during the Panthers’ first freshman game. Stringer played a solid first half, but began to suffer from symptoms that mimicked a possible concussion and was pulled for precautionary reasons. Shortly after being cleared to resume team practices, he passed out.

“He had a series of episodes,” recalled his father, Jim Stringer, also the Panthers’ head football coach. “He’d begin to show signs of being dizzy. He’d kind of zone out, and the next thing you know, he’d be on the ground passed out.”

The cause of the episodes baffled both Stringer and doctors, who theorized a number of possible causes. They also presented a great deal of concern due to the totality of the episode.

“It wasn’t like he was just dazed,” Stringer said of his son. “When he was out, he was completely out. The doctors had me running sharp objects over the soles of his feet. They told me to hit him, to poke him with a needle or pin to see if he responded. All of this stuff, and none of it got any sort of a reaction.”

The answer to the problem was first provided by a friend of a friend.

“I’d been talking to a friend of mine on the phone and telling him about what we were dealing with and how frustrated I was and he evidently started talking to a friend of his who was a doctor,” said Stringer. “That guy called me up one night and we spent some time talking and he said he was sending me an article and to read and see if that sounded like it matched what Riley was experiencing.”

It did. And with that revelation, Stringer was able to put a name to the ailment — basilar migraines.

“There’s these two arteries that go up along your brain stem in the back of your neck that deliver blood and oxygen to the brain,” Stringer said, explaining the condition. “If the body undergoes stress, the muscles will pinch off the blood flow and the body just shuts down. It’s a defense mechanism.”

In the case of the younger Stringer, it was a defense mechanism running amok. Doctors theorized the cause may stem from a heat stroke the teen suffered the previous summer.

“They think that reduced his resistance level some, and that made it easier for each subsequent episode,” Jim Stringer said.

With the condition diagnosed, doctors were able to prescribe a treatment regimen for Riley. It reduced the number of fainting episodes and enabled him to get back on the field late in the Panthers’ state championship football season, but was unsuccessful in completely overcoming things.

As wrestling season began at Powell High School, the condition creeped back into the teen’s life.

“We were at the first wrestling meet of the year,” the elder Stringer recalled. “He’d wrestled in the dual the night before and just didn’t look like himself. Then he loses his first tournament match against a kid he’s handled throughout his career and, again, just looked like a shadow of himself. Before the second match, I looked in his eyes and you could just see he wasn’t there, and I said that’s it.”

Within 10 minutes, Riley had suffered another attack. The decision was made to keep him off the mat throughout the wrestling season to allow his body time to heal and return to normal resistance levels.

“Basically, every time he was passing out, we were told that was kind of resetting things. We had to give him a long break to allow his body to build back up,” Stringer said.

That meant agonizing weeks for Riley as he watched the Panthers claim their third state wrestling championship in five years without being able to contribute or participate in a sport he loved. The time away from athletics succeeded in eliminating Riley’s blackout incidents and, after the conclusion of the high school wrestling season, the teen was allowed back onto the mat to see what happened.

His first trip back was the Rocky Mountain Nationals tournament.

“I just thought it would be good for his confidence to just get back out there,” said Stringer. “He got maybe four practices in to work on his conditioning and his cardio, and then he was on the mat. You could see the difference immediately. He was back.”

And he was in the familiar position of winning.

“He had a great tournament,” Urbach said. “His championship match, he hit a really tough kid from Colorado Springs and scored a 4-3 victory. He wrestled a great match.”

Stringer got to celebrate that victory with several other Powell youth. Seven other members of the community were also in attendance competing at the meet.

Kyle Catlin placed fourth out of a field of 50 kids in the 15-and-under 130-pound division. He won four of his six matches and earned an honorary All American title by virtue of that result.

Nic Urbach and Colton Parham each missed by one victory of joining Stringer and Catlin in the top eight. The pair won three out of five matches to get eliminated in the top 12, one round shy of All American status.

Chance Karst went 2-2 in a bracket of 44 kids. Waylon Bays also finished with two wins in four matches after pulling a tough bracket draw. Bays’ two losses came to the eventual national runner-up and the tournament’s third-place finisher. Zach Thompson was 2-2 with one of his losses coming to a recently-crowned Colorado High School state champion.

Reese Karst was Powell’s final representative at the tournament. The younger Karst was winless in two matches, having to start the tournament by going against the eventual national champion in the 12 and under 74-pound division.