Sports Editor
Dodge City High School junior Evan Darville is a dominant athlete. It’s pretty much as simple as that.
At over 6 feet tall, and over 280 pounds, Darville is a mix of speed, strength and agility.
He can pin opponents in the high school 285 weight division in under two minutes, as he did multiple times during the 6A state wrestling tournament this year.
Or, on the football field, he can work in tandem with other talented athletes to be the foundation of a football defense, like he did with fellow-junior Marcos Fisher this year.
“We changed our scheme of our defense for those two to be able to beat and destroy any blocker that lines up across from ‘em,” Red Demons head football coach Dave Foster said. “We didn’t give those guys one-gap responsibilities like most teams would, we gave ‘em two-gap responsibility because that’s the kind of responsibility that we place on higher-level players.”
Most players, he said, are not asked to do that.
“It’s been eight years at Dodge City High School and the kid’s name was Jesse Trent,” Foster said. “Jesse Trent was a state champion wrestler as well. That’s the last time we took a D-lineman and said ‘You own these two gaps, and that’s just how we’re gonna do this. You’ve worked that hard and that guy across from you hasn’t week-in and week-out, so you’re go destroy two people.”
Trent won the 2011 state wrestling title in the 285 division, the same class Darville wrestled in this year.
Before that though, in 2010, he lost in the final match, finishing second in the 285 division, the same place Darville finished this season after losing in double- overtime in the final match of his division’s tournament.
Darville’s athleticism
is nothing new. Red Demons head wrestling coach Lars Lueders said he first reached out to Darville in seventh grade.
At the time, Lueders was looking for a big man with some strength to add to his roster, and he heard from football coaches about how athletic and fast Darville was for his size.
“Seventh grade was when during football season I pulled him out of class and I gave him a packet that explained how wrestling helps football, and then gave him kind of quotes from a lot of pro players that were wrestlers and explained how wrestling helps them in football,” Lueders said.
Darville went out for the wrestling team that season, and quickly showed his potential on the mat.
“During his first season, I think he only lost one time, and he ended up beating that kid that he lost to at the league championship,” Lueders said. “For a first year wrestler to go out and dominate and to be as successful as he was, was very impressive. He had the right mentality for the sport, he’s competitive, he liked winning, which is very important. He’s just extremely athletic for how big he was.”
For Darville, football came first.
He said he tried out for wrestling because of how the skills it teaches an athlete translate to football, and because of how many great things he heard and read about it, specifically from NFL linemen.
Despite his abilities, Darville has also had challenges he has had to overcome.
His favorite part of football is having to completely overpower opponents, beating them in every way. The same is true for wrestling.
“I think that also with wrestling, when you beat an opponent, it just feels good to know that all that is just work you’ve done, not just something that happens there,” Darville said. “You’ve done work to prepare for it so it feels real good to beat somebody.”
But being aggressive hasn’t always been something that has come easily to Darville.
During recreational football league in middle school he would have to restrain himself a little.
“I was just always so much bigger than them, I would have to tone it down a little bit,” Darville said. “So I always felt bad for them.”
Last year, Darville competed at the state wrestling tournament, but failed to place.
One thing that has changed between last year and this one is how aggressive he has learned to be.
“That was a big struggle all the way through his wrestling career is to get him to be more aggressive,” Lueders said. “That was the main difference this season, is that he finally I think got over that and understood that it’s OK to be aggressive, it’s OK to use your full strength, and I think that really paid off for him and that was a big reason for his jump in performance.”
Darville said he started to get a little better at being aggressive during freshman year, and taking wrestling more seriously that season helped.
The effect of wrestling practice on football didn’t happen in any one moment for him though.
“Wrestling practice, it’s always a grind and you’ve gotta push through it and you’ve gotta always be aggressive,” Darville said. “Even if your technique starts falling apart, if you’re aggressive you can still hang in there which I think really helped me with football because even if I wasn’t the best guy out there, if I was the most aggressive I was sure gonna play really well.”
He has also become more confident on the football field.
“I think as a freshman I’d go half-speed, fearing that I would mess up or something and get the coaches mad or something,” Darville said.
Going all-out in the weight room has also helped him develop the strength he needs to control his two gaps, he said.
Another challenge he has had to overcome has been learning to love wrestling itself. He wrestled because of how much it translated over to football, but took eighth grade year off from it before returning as a freshman.
“It took me a while to really fall in love, I guess you’d say, with the sport,” Darville said. “It probably started I think last summer during wrestling camp. I saw all the work that I put in it translate over into me getting better and I think that’s really when I started to like wrestling just for wrestling, not necessarily just as a football (beneficial) sport or anything like that.”
His work ethic though is something lauded by both Lueders and Foster.
Foster said the first three words that come to mind when he thinks about Darville are “explosive,” “coachable” and “big man.” His favorite thing about Darville though, is his consistency.
“He’s just consistent with the respect and attitude that he brings,” Foster said. “In the summer when nobody else wants to show up, he’s here. Marcos Fisher’s the same type of kid: Kids that work even when they don’t want to work, they’re just consistent people and that’s really what you want out of everybody involved with the program: Consistency.”
That consistency allowed him to achieve some impressive statistics in his junior football season.
He played in all nine games for the Red Demons football team in the 201718 season, leading the team with 69 tackles, tied for first on the team assists with 43, tied for second in solo tackles with 26, and alone in second on the team in tackles for loss, having recorded seven.
His success on the football field and on the wrestling mat has earned him All-WAC First Team selections in both the fall and winter sports seasons. With the Red Demons varsity track and field season kicking off tonight, Darville is competing again.
If he can earn First-Team All-WAC in track and field, he’ll be the first Red Demon to be First-Team All-WAC three times in an academic year since Dayton McGroarty did it in the 2015-16 school year in football, basketball and baseball.
He isn’t thinking too much about that though, he said, and is just focusing on learning the best technique he can at his track and field events.
“I know I have the strength for it,” Darville said. “I just need my technique.”
Going into next football season, though, Darville said he wants to see the Red Demons give themselves a shot and win the first playoff game.
“I think with the team we have, we can really do some things in the postseason and maybe even shock some people,” Darville said.
Individually, Darville has goals as well.
“My goal for football I would say (would be to be) first-team All State and then I would want to receive a DI scholarship offer or something of that sort,” Darville said. “And I think for wrestling, I really want to be a state champion.”
