Master of his craft: Rogers wrestling coach Rod Tamura readies for retirement after nearly four decades in the sport

Rod Tamura grew up knowing he was going to be a Lewis and Clark Tiger.

That’s where his mom went to high school. It’s also where his older brother and sister attended.

But a redrawing of district lines in the 1970s changed everything for Tamura.

And now, he couldn’t imagine being anything other than a Rogers Pirate.

“Once I got to this place, all of my teachers and people that guided me were so influential,” Tamura said. “They supported me, made me believe that I could do things. And I was able to hang around so many like-minded guys that it really shaped who I am today.”

Five decades after he first walked the halls of Rogers High School, Tamura is now ready for his final chapter to come to a close.

The 13-year head coach of the Pirates wrestling team is set to retire following this month’s Mat Classic, capping a coaching career that has spanned the better part of 40 years.

“I’ve always wanted to be somebody that’s not like everybody else. You want to encourage kids, even if they’re not the best wrestlers,” Tamura said. “It’s nice to win matches, it’s nice to be competitive. But if it’s going to help a kid with his self-esteem, that means the most. The whole thing is, I care about what happens after you leave our program.”

Tricks up his sleeve

Tamura didn’t begin wrestling until he was in seventh grade. But being involved in a sport centered around technique and physicality wasn’t new to him.

A third-generation Japanese-American, Tamura took up judo at the age of 7. Tamura enjoyed spending time with other Japanese kids in town while learning techniques and gaining a toughness that would help him when he transitioned to the wrestling mat.

“We had a sensei from Japan who carried around one of those kendo sticks and if you were messing around or disrespecting another sensei, you’d get hit on the back of the thigh,” Tamura said. “But when I got to wrestling, I didn’t have to practice a head and arm, because the senseis in judo drilled that into me.”

For the skills that didn’t naturally translate, Tamura looked to the guidance of Hall of Fame coach Ken Pelo.

“He was just a kid that always gave 100% at all times,” Pelo said. “He was one of the best takedown artists in the city from his judo background, and although he wasn’t the biggest kid, he was always smart enough to not get himself in trouble on the mat.”

Tamura credits his growth not only as a wrestler, but as a leader, to his time with Pelo – who led the Pirates program for 37 years as the school’s first head coach until he retired in 1996.

“I went home after practices and came back to school so sore that I could barely get to my homeroom on the third floor,” Tamura said. “But then, for whatever reason, your mind and your body does weird things, and by the time practice came along that next day, I had forgotten about it.

“But it was the culture that he had built through the 1960s to the time I was there in the late ’70s. … That was the expectation.”

That culture helped build four state champions for the Pirates by 1975, including brothers Mark and Mike Kondo, also Japanese-American.

After graduating from Eastern Washington University, Tamura approached Pelo about a job on his staff, but there were no paid positions available at the time.

“He told me about this job over at Shadle Park, so I started there as an assistant in my 20s and stayed there for nine years until becoming a head coach there at 28,” Tamura said. “But by the end of it, I was also teaching at Ridgeview Elementary and it’s hell to do two different jobs like that. I was a 125-pound kid, and when I got down to around 114, my wife said I had to go to the doctor. He said it was the stress getting to me.”

Tamura’s wife, Marie, suggested he look into a job at the middle school level, where he could teach and coach all in one place. That led to a coaching gig at Salk Middle School and then two years later a job at Glover Middle School where he could teach and coach.

“That Glover job was special because it was under one of my middle school coaches at Shaw from years before, and he knew my background and said, ‘You design the program, you run the practices,’ ” Tamura said.

Tamura then took a short break from coaching while he worked on his principal certificate at Whitworth to try and be a role model for kids of color that he didn’t have growing up. Then came an opening at Garry Middle School, which he saw as a natural fit.

“I had actually wanted to kind of come back to the northeast side of town because I went to Stevens Elementary, I went to Shaw, obviously graduated from Rogers,” Tamura said. “So like a lot of us, this place is a magnet. And there’s a certain number of staff that are former students.”

Then 13 years ago, the Rogers job opened. Tamura said he heard from everyone, from former teammates who had grandkids going into the program to coaches in other sports at the school.

But a phone call from his former coach sealed the deal.

“The call from Pelo was like the call of death,” Tamura laughed. “Because I knew once he called I couldn’t say no. So 13 years ago, I took the job on and became another Pirate that’s run the program since Pelo retired.”

Pelo said that the key to suggesting Tamura for the job was the stability he knew Tamura would offer to a program which had seen active coaching turnover in the few years before.

“I was just hoping he would be interested, because I knew his background as a wrestler and as a successful coach at several levels,” Pelo said. “But mostly I knew he would be committed to Rogers for as long as he wanted to coach, and that he would be committed to the kids and the community.

“Words really cannot describe how proud I am of Rod and the work he has done with the program. He is an example of the very best that Rogers can produce.”

In landing the job, Tamura became the Greater Spokane League’s second Japanese head wrestling coach – joining Mark Kondo, who coached at Ferris in the early ’80s, bringing representation into a leadership role for the school and sport.

He was also able to bring along his son Jamie to join the staff. And although Jamie is unlikely to take over his dad’s role after this season, he said he will never forget all that he has learned over the past decade working with him.

“Just kind of that next level of patience and understanding and coming up with nontraditional ways to show things,” Jamie said. “Different types of terminology that sticks with the kids versus the technical terminology that we know as, you know, wrestling heads or whatever.

“He’s taught these kids both in wrestling and I think in life that you can’t build a tower without a solid foundation.”

Teaching toughness

A common theme growing up in the Tamura household was toughness.

That’s how Jim and Janet Tamura raised their three children – Jim Jr., Patti and Rod. While being disciplined, tough and focused was expected of the children, Jim and Janet grew up without a choice otherwise.

As teenagers, both of Tamura’s parents impacted by World War II, with Janet and her family being forced into an internment camp, while Jim served in the Army doing boot camp in Kansas before spending time in the South Pacific. Ten camps across the country held nearly 120,000 people of Japanese decent, with approximately two-thirds of them being U.S. citizens. Jim Tamura’s parents spent time at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California, and the Minidoka War Relocation Center – which is located in south-central Idaho, while Janet and her family were held at Minidoka until 1945.

“It was such a large community down at Minidoka that my parents didn’t realize until years later when they got married that their families were there together at the same time,” Tamura said. “But my dad grew up in Kent, Washington, on a farm and my mom was living as a seventh-grader in an apartment in Seattle when it happened.

“The more I learned about it, the more I realized, if I can have any influence on educating people I want to do that.”

Tamura took that passion for sharing both the stories of his family, along with those of other Japanese-Americans during that time, and found a way to teach it in a way he felt the history books were glossing over.

“I was coaching at Glover at the time and I saw the new history curriculum come in and the book had one page on the incarceration of Japanese-Americans,” Tamura said. “I said that’s not enough, so I talked with my parents, got some artifacts and just did a bunch of research myself. They subbed me out all day so I could go around and teach classes about something that happened in their own backyard.”

Tamura has also taken an active role in speaking at the Mukogawa Institute and at events hosted by the Spokane Buddhist Temple – where his grandparents were charter members.

“One of the reasons I want to keep sharing these stories is that I’m going to be 66 soon, so I think about how much longer I can do this before my memory goes,” Tamura said. “I want to inspire the next generation to find the passion to keep telling these stories, otherwise that is how history repeats itself.”

Final act

With Tamura’s final postseason as a head coach beginning this weekend at the District 6 tournament at the Convention Center, he’s tried to push the message to his wrestlers that they have an opportunity to make a statement on the mat.

With no district tie-in at the 2A level, the tournament will be between the seven Greater Spokane League schools. And the Pirates finished right in the middle of the pack with a 3-3 record.

“I’ve got a few kids that I think can make some noise at state, but it starts with putting their heads down this weekend,” Tamura said. “Last year we had several third-fourth place matches where kids were wrestling for a chance to get to state and we lost all of them.

“I just told the kids the other day, the life lessons are working hard, sticking with it, and not feeling sorry for yourself. That you don’t understand how much your body can do, even though when you think you’re mentally tired, you can actually do more.

Jamie said his dad’s background at Rogers and being a part of the community for so long has made this job more special for him. Especially since most of the wrestlers that come through the Pirates program don’t have a background in the sport or the ability to go to a lot of clinics or camps.

“He understands the outside perspective that the kids go through sometimes, just because they haven’t been wrestling their whole lives,” Jamie said. “They weren’t blessed like me to have a dad who was a wrestling coach, and then kind of forced me at a young age to get into it.

“We get a lot of kids who haven’t had that experience, and so, sometimes playing catch-up is the most difficult part. But he better than most understands that the potential is there.”

And from that belief in potential came a phrase that Tamura had printed on the back of the Rogers wrestling sweatshirts: Shokunin.

“It means that whatever your craft is, you are always doing the best to learn and perfect it. To be a master of it,” Tamura said. “There’s always learning from the next person, to do it better, to make it the best.

“And so I thought that’s what wrestling’s all about, because you start out a lot of times not knowing anything, and it’s your desire to want to improve and get better and become the best you can be.”