Welcome to the West Allis Central Fieldhouse
How a fictional story grew from a very non-fictional setting
I’ve been asked a lot where this story came from, and the answer always comes back to a place and a time. Before I knew Nick or Becky, I knew their story would begin in a particular place—the cavernous field house at Central High School in West Allis, Wisconsin.
Long before I ever realized I’d be narrowing the scope of my story to their high school years, I had a scene in my mind where my characters met after a competition there.
Maybe this strikes you as odd. Why WAC? I’m not a Central alum. Even in my own high school years in South Milwaukee, the Central Bulldogs were a conference opponent but never a particularly heated rival. I guess the answer lies in my experience as a prep wrestler.
The West Allis Central Field House (since renamed for legendary WAC wrestling coach E.H. Stech) is probably the spiritual home of high school wrestling in southeast Wisconsin. My own high school wrestling coach was a Central alum, and the close ties he maintained with his alma mater created the unique situation that led to me and my classmates actually wrestling more matches at WAC over our four years than we did in our own home gym. Yes, we wrestled the Bulldogs every year during the conference season— but we were also guests at every tournament WAC hosted. Most telling of all, we were the other “home” team for a quadrangular meet Central hosted every year against a pair of high-quality opponents from outside our conference. We got as comfortable there as a visiting school could get.
My hometown and West Allis were (and remain) fairly similar places. Both were old, proud suburban cities built around gigantic industrial plants that had boomed in the mid-twentieth century. The 1980s weren’t kind to either factory or the towns surrounding them. By 1992, the year my story is set, they’d both begun an inexorable socioeconomic decline that we were only just beginning to notice as we finished our high school years. I wanted to write about that, to subtly juxtapose that vague awareness of a creeping decay surrounding us with the optimism and sense of immortality that teenagers always feel, and (I think) we especially felt back then, in the early 90s after the Berlin Wall fell and took the rest of the Iron Curtain with it, changing the world forever.
More than that, I wanted to write a coming-of-age story, and in so many ways the WAC fieldhouse looms large over those years in my own life. Wrestling, for one, was key in my own development as a person and that’s something I wanted to go back to and dig into with fiction. (It’s Becky who jokingly tells us “All fiction is therapy” and while I don’t agree with her, maybe on this topic I’d cede some ground.) But where and how to introduce that to a story?
Well, wrestling tournaments at WAC had something no other tournament did. There were the usual adrenaline-crazed high school grapplers milling around, yes, but one thing that set Central apart was a pep squad they called the “Wrestlettes.” Sadly made anachronistic now by the explosion of girls’ wrestling, any visiting wrestler could tell you the Wrestlettes made tournaments in that field house memorable. They were girls who worked concessions, ran paperwork to and from scorers’ tables, posted brackets on the walls and just generally maintained a high degree of visibility throughout the building. They did cheers, too, but calling them “cheerleaders” would do them a disservice. They were a special group, unique to West Allis Central and its storied wrestling tradition, and you couldn’t help but notice them. It was a natural and believable step to bring a visiting wrestler and one of these girls into close proximity and give them a reason or three to let sparks fly.
In real life, I had so many memorable matches in that field house. I don’t remember them all, of course, but it was the scene of some of my biggest victories as well as my most crushing losses, the kinds of moments that stay with you forever. By sticking with me, impacting me, they inspired me to find this setting and ultimately to write this story. I’m grateful they did. Like I said, I’m not a Central alum, but in later years, as I’ve watched my sons run track meets and now wrestle in it themselves, I’ve realized the Bulldogs’ building means about as much to me as any building can.
When I wrote my first sentence, I was envisioning a ten-year story with plenty of gaps, weaves, twists and turns that would unfold over the extent of young adulthood. I would only later realize I could narrow my scope to a few months’ time in the characters’ lives. Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that the WAC fieldhouse was my setting gave me my two protagonists. One of them had to be a wrestler. Another had to be a Wrestlette. I’d throw them together in an unlikely, dramatic, Hollywood-style moment of high tension and see what happened.
What came out of that would surprise even me.