MOUNT VERNON – Gabe Harmon wears his emotion on his sleeve and his passion on his chest. The latter is quite literal in the form of a tattoo honoring his older brother, Tyler Harmon, and the Mount Vernon wrestling team.
The Mount Vernon senior wrestler and his teammates returned to old stomping grounds at Pleasant Street Elementary School for the first time this season and rolled to a 63-18 win over Olentangy Berlin in a non-league dual on Thursday, Feb. 4.
Harmon, a 220-pounder, notched his 99th career victory with a major decision over Berlin’s JT Tompkins.
“Gabe Harmon is a kid who’s a leader and has been in the program for four years,” Mount Vernon coach Nate Cornell said. “It was a big night for him and he was ready to go. So it was nice to see him get a win. That was a good kid that he wrestled too.”
The Harmons were not a wrestling family until John Brown convinced Tyler to wrestle. Gabe looked up to his older brother.
“I loved watching everybody wrestle,” Gabe said. “During breaks, I was always on the mats wrestling around with the team. They really just invited me in.”
He wanted to wrestle, and he wanted to do it at Pleasant Street under the spotlight.
“The atmosphere in this room back then … it’s almost just breath-taking,” Gabe said. “When they kicked open the door and ran the circle, you could feel the wind on your face and see the mat shift. It was “go” time. I loved that and I got into it.”
It’s an imposing force for an opposing team. Berlin coach Josh Heffernan knows Pleasant Street quite well from the other bench. He coached with Delaware Hayes for many years against the Yellow Jackets and with Brown in the Junior Olympics.
“Opposing teams hate this place, which means it’s awesome,” Heffernan said. “I’ve had many great battles in here with many teams. Coach Brown and I were great friends back in the day, and he taught me a lot.
“A number of duals in this gym were for conference titles for a long time there. It seemed like every year for five or six years there, it was Delaware and Mount Vernon heading off for (an Ohio Capital Conference) title. (I have) a lot of good memories in here and a lot of painful memories in here.”
The Jackets have a wrestling room inside the new Energy Fieldhouse. The size of the fieldhouse allows for people to spread out a little more in a pandemic world.
The new digs provide the wrestling team everything it could ever need.
“We have all the praise and thanks for having that new wrestling room,” Cornell said. “We love it. The wrestling room is immaculate; the weight room’s great. We love the weight room and have been using that as much as we could. Even the indoor track ... the kids do a nice job of doing their legwork and getting after it, conditioning-wise. We’re very fortunate and grateful for it.”
There was a pause before the proverbial “but.”
“As far as dual meets go, this is our home,” Cornell said. “The kids love it; the parents love it. Even at school today, the teachers were all talking to me about it. Alumni, former parents … everybody. Even coaches from other schools were talking about it and excited for us to be back at Pleasant Street.”
