‘Indiana needs Perry Meridian to be something special’: Ed Pendoski and his return to coaching
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Ed Pendoski retired from coaching last June. His 30-year voyage in the high school wrestling scene, which featured the last 12 seasons at Carmel, had ended.
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That's until the head coaching job at Perry Meridian became available.
His original decision to step away came down to his health. His body, which had endured multiple knee surgeries, was in rough shape. He took about year off to get healthy.
He decided to pursue real estate and even helped Warren Central on the mat during that time. After some advice from a mentor, he realized that he belonged back on the mat.
“I did get my real estate license, but the reality is that God wanted me to be a wrestling coach,” Pendoski said.
Since its inception in 1973 and before Pendoski joined the ranks, Perry Meridian wrestling had three different head coaches over its history.
Phil Strader. Jim Tonte. Matt Schoettle.
Strader was the inaugural coach in 1973 before he retired after the 1995-96 season. Tonte took over the reins until his departure in 2015. Schoettle led the program for the next decade.
Pendoski joined that exclusive club after he was named the team's new head coach last week. Over five decades of excellence of the program's history drew him back to coaching full-time.
The Falcons have won three IHSAA state team titles, highlighted by a three-peat under Tonte from 2011 to 2013. They've also produced 15 individual state champions.
“Indiana needs Perry Meridian wrestling to be something special,” Pendoski said. “It’s important that Perry Meridian is good because of the community. You look at where I was in life and an opportunity like this came up. This is something that’s really special.
"If it was a different place, I don’t know if I would’ve taken the job ... the community and all the work that generations of people before have done is what makes this place a special place.”
Pendoski is a veteran in the coaching world. He started his career as an assistant coach at Portage High School in 1995 before he was promoted to head coach in 1998. After a decade there, he spent eight years at Central Indiana Academy (CIA) wrestling in Indianapolis before he joined Carmel in 2013.
Pendoski will now lead a Falcons program with a foundation that is rock solid. A new coaching staff needs to be assembled, and the team needs to buy in collectively, but the program’s tradition has already been built on the shoulders of the wrestling enthusiasts that came before.
“Whether we’re shooting doubles or trying to hit stand-ups on the mat, the one thing we have to do is get united as a group and remember that we are Perry Meridian,” Pendoski said. “We just got to keep being Perry Meridian. We don’t have to recreate much here because of what’s left from the years before. It’s almost generational.”
Pendoski, the president of the Indiana High School Wrestling Coaches Association, has produced multiple sectional and regional team titles as a coach over the last three decades. He has also coached state qualifiers and individual champions, but his most prized honor is instilling values in wrestlers that go beyond the mat.
Pendoski still plans to invest time in real estate over the summer. In his new full-time role, he will get an opportunity to shape the next wave of wrestlers in a program rooted in tradition.
“I do believe our sport is better than any other sport in preparing people for life with how hard it is: the commitment, the weight management … it’s brutal,” Pendoski said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to spend my entire life in that environment — to be able to work with kids.
"This is my fourth chapter, and this is a pretty excited one because of everything that’s there (at Perry Meridian) and the opportunities that are there to put a good product on the mat that people want to watch.”
Marc Ray is a high school sports reporter at the IndyStar. He can be reached at [email protected] , and on X, formerly Twitter, at @themarcszn.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Why Ed Pendoski returned to coach Indiana high school wrestling