LIVE OAK — The examples were right there in front of Holden Corbin.
After qualifying for state as a sophomore heavyweight at Suwannee and then medaling as a junior, Corbin wanted something more as a senior. He wanted to be like Marshall White and Austin McKinney and the upperclassmen that he had watched in previous years.
He wanted to be a state title contender.
“I wanted to work my butt off to look like Marshall,” Corbin said. “Marshall is such a big icon to me, especially watching him wrestle. So a big thing for me is I wanted to look like him, I wanted to get to the finals, I want to be on the podium again and I wanted to show everybody that I can do this that nobody in the state is as good as me.”
That desire led Corbin to take a work trip last summer. Fresh off that seventh place finish last spring, Corbin headed to Minnesota for a week during the offseason. There, he wrestled under the tutelage of Jake Clark, a 10-time U.S. national wrestling champion and a Greco-Roman world champion. It also allowed Corbin a chance to compete and work out with current collegiate wrestlers and grapple with some guys his own size for a change.
It paid off. While Corbin didn’t reach the state title match this season, he did return to the medal stand at the Class 1A state meet and placed fifth, earning him the title of Lake City Reporter Wrestler of the Year just like White before him.
“He really did a lot of work over the summer,” Suwannee coach Joey Phillips said, adding he also competed with competitive summer teams as well. “He went out and sought high-level competition.”
That wasn’t the only work Corbin did following his junior campaign to try to take that next step in the hopes of becoming the Bulldogs’ first state champion since Shawn Brown in 2014. He also was busy in the weight room, adding 20 pounds of muscle onto his frame. For a heavyweight that had been on the smaller side, suddenly he was weighing in around 280.
“It doesn’t hurt when you’re the big guy in heavyweight,” Phillips added.
But for Corbin, he’s long detested the viewpoint that heavyweight wrestlers are just big, sluggish guys where whoever falls on their back first is going to lose the match. He always strived to be more than that, to be a real wrestler who just happened to be a heavyweight.
That included some of his takeaways from his trip north last summer.
“I worked a lot on my stance and used my length — I’m kind of tall — to keep distance,” Corbin said. “Heavyweights will try and shoot and do something stupid, so use that to my advantage, keep my distance and wait for them to do something dumb, take advantage of that and then re-attack.”
It paid off with a big senior campaign. Corbin, who finished the year 51-8, blitzed through the postseason. He rolled to District 2-1A and Region 1-1A individual titles and was the top seed at the state tournament where he also started off in dominant fashion.
After pinning his first two opponents, Corbin was in the semifinals against Key West’s Alexandre Allens, a wrestler he had beaten three times already. He was one match away from that goal of wrestling for a state title.
“Going into that match, I think I let it get too big for me,” Corbin said, recalling his 10-4 defeat to Allens on March 6 in Kissimmee. “Honestly, I could have pulled that match off and I should have. Going into that match, everybody was like, ‘When you get in the finals, when you get in the finals.’ In my head I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I still have one more match.’ I let that carry in and I was sluggish out there. That kid had a good match.”
Phillips said Corbin “laid a goose egg.”
But that state tournament, which then included a second setback against Berkeley Prep’s Nathanel Lovelace before pinning Evangelical Christian’s Lennox Washington to claim fifth place, doesn’t take away from Corbin’s overall season. One where he proved he was among the state’s elite wrestlers.
Both Phillips and Corbin pointed to the Knockout Christmas Classic in Kissimmee as the moment that showed he had arrived. While Corbin placed fourth in that tournament, he was able to compete with everybody there outside of Cardinal Gibbons standout Michael Mocco, an Iowa signee who has gone undefeated the past two seasons.
“Watching us compete against him versus everybody else, it was very apparent that Holden was on a different playing field from most of the other Florida wrestlers,” Phillips said, noting that Corbin wrestled all four of the state finalists in the two largest classes and had wins against them. “He was the best of that group this year, I thought.”
That rise goes back to all the work he put in last summer. It allowed Corbin to add the physical wrestling ability to match his technical prowess.
Corbin’s desire to be more than just a lumbering heavyweight had always been true, Phillips said.
“He’s a complete wrestler,” he said, noting that Corbin is probably the best heavyweight he’s ever coached. “There were very few kids in the state who could out-wrestle Holden. He could get out-physicaled, out-athleted. But he was never beat because he didn’t know what was going on.”
That, to Phillips, is where the offseason work elevated Corbin’s game. With that additional muscle and weight, Corbin no longer was being out-physicaled.
Rather, he was now physically dominating kids, pushing them to where he wanted them, to set up his move, which Phillips said Corbin’s teammates joke is his only move, the headlock.
“Everyone in the state knew he was going to hit you with the headlock,” Phillips said. “But if you go back and watch his matches, you can see five, six, seven steps ahead of him setting that headlock up by moving kids in different ways.
“He really was phenomenal in the way he could do that.”
It’s a move he learned five years ago at Suwannee Middle School. It’s a move he started using because of his height, which gave him leverage against his opponents. It even worked the past few years at the high school level when he was an undersized heavyweight. Or at least it worked at times.
But it also came with some risk.
“It’s a high risk move,” Corbin said. “If I get it, you’re either going to stick the kid and win or get rolled through and then you have to fight after that…I got a little heavier so when I hit it, they couldn’t roll me through so easily.
“But I would go in, I’d start circling toward that side I wanted, I’d punch my underhook in and then I’d just rip it.”
He ripped it to the tune of a second straight state medal and the hopes of continuing his career in college.
The only thing it didn’t lock down was that elusive state title, one that he could have shared with his father, Lee, who won the heavyweight crown in 1995.
“I wanted that really bad, to have that first father-son type of thing, especially at Suwannee,” Corbin said. “Son-father state champs, that was a big drive. I was really hoping to get that this year. I was definitely close.”
ALL-AREA TEAM
126: Rylan Milian
Suwannee, junior
35-16 record, Class 1A state qualifier, fourth in Region 1, District 2 runner-up
140: Bella Guerrier-Lajoir
Columbia, senior
34-3 record, District 2 champ, came up a win short of state at regionals
190: Amariah Handy
Suwannee, freshman
16-12 record, Class 1A state qualifier, third in Region 1, third in District 2
190: Landon Slater
Suwannee, senior
28-10 record, Class 1A state qualifier, Region 1 runner-up, District 2 champion
215: Xavier Williams
Columbia, sophomore
42-18 record, Class 2A state qualifier, third in Region 1, District 2 runner-up
235: Hanalee Corbin
Suwannee, freshman
22-13 record, Class 1A state qualifier, Region 1 runner-up, District 2 champ
285: Holden Corbin
Suwannee, senior
51-8 record, fifth at Class 1A state, Region 1 champ, District 2 champ
COACH OF THE YEAR
Joey Phillips, Suwannee
Led the SHS boys to a third-place finish at the District 2-1A IBT and a fifth-place finish in Region 1-1A, qualifying three boys for state with Holden Corbin reaching the medal stand with a fifth-place finish in the 285 class.