Sunnyside High School’s storied wrestling dynasty is getting a new $2.7M home

Over the past 50 years, the cramped, crowded and hot room has served as a home base for one of the most successful athletic programs in Arizona high school sports, producing state and national champions, Olympians and hundreds of inspired and highly-achieving student-athletes.

On Wednesday morning, Sunnyside announced a new chapter for its star program, hosting a groundbreaking ceremony for a long-awaited upgrade to its wrestling room.

“If those four walls could speak, I’m sure many of those stories would be fantastic,” Sunnyside head wrestling coach Anthony Leon said. “But I can’t wait for what the stories our new walls will tell one day… I have seen some of the most incredible people I have ever met mold themselves inside our facility, and I can’t wait for the continued success and investment in the community and investment in our wrestlers that comes with this new project.”

Leon, along with Sunnyside Unified School District Superintendent Jose Gastelum, principal Stephanie Ponce, athletic director Casey O’Brien and representatives from CORE Construction and SPS+ Architects, all spoke at Wednesday’s on-campus ceremony, each echoing the shared theme that the Blue Devils’ wrestling program is incredibly deserving of a new facility.

“This wrestling room is going to be beautiful, and it’s well deserved and earned,” Ponce said. “This particular room is extremely important to us because these are generations of champions, not just state champions, but national champions, Olympians, who have come through here and they’ve grinded in a very small room with a lot of kids, and they’ve never complained.”

“Generations after generations have earned this building and so we’re proud that we can give it to our kids.”

According to Sunnyside’s head coach, the project is set to cost just north of $2.7 million and will be a much more expansive space compared to the school’s historically gritty, but undersized room. While it will have plenty of shiny new features, the coaching staff also placed huge emphasis on honoring the facility and program’s prestige and heritage.

“This facility offers an all-inclusive wrestling room,” Leon shared. “Four mats, 5,500 square feet, coach’s office, cardio room, fitness room. But most importantly, it echoes the program’s history. It will tell the story of the program, which is most important to us for people to see when they walk inside.”

The wrestling facility is the last of Sunnyside’s athletic facilities to be revamped as a result of Proposition 416, an override that passed in November 2025, which granted SUSD $120 million for upgrades covering facilities, safety, athletics, fine arts, technology and transportation.

The project has an aggressive six-month timeline, with plans for an unveiling in early spring. Sunnyside wrestlers will be relocated to nearby Sierra Middle School to continue their training for the season, which begins in December, but will certainly be rewarded when they return in early spring.

“The student-athletes that practice here year-round every day simply needed more room to do the work that they’re doing as the program has grown,” SPS+ Architecture Managing Partner Mark Davenport said. “We are creating more dedicated practice and training space, areas where families can watch and places to proudly display the trophies, banners and history of the Sunnyside wrestling program.”

The need for more space has become increasingly apparent with the rise of girls wrestling in Arizona, particularly at Sunnyside, the first Arizona school to field a girls team. The Blue Devils won back-to-back Arizona Interscholastic Association Girls Wrestling Championships in 2025 and 2026.

Ponce, whose daughter wrestled for the Blue Devils, remembers what it was like to see 70-80 wrestlers sharing the space.

“It’s hot, it smells, there are so many kids packed in there,” the principal recalled. “They all work in there and wrestle and try to throw each other around, and they all do it so seamlessly, but they deserve a bigger space.”

The Blue Devils wrestling program has won a historic 39 boys state wrestling titles dating back to 1979, the first under legendary head coach Don Klostreich. The architect behind the Sunnyside dynasty won nine titles, eight straight from 1981-1988, before handing the keys to his assistant coach, Richard Sanchez, who went on to win five consecutive titles from 1990-1994.

Bobby DeBerry, who came aboard in 1992 as an assistant under Sanchez, carried on the Sunnyside dynasty with a historic 15 state championships between 1996 and 2011. Leon took over for DeBerry in 2013 and has won 10 championships to date, including nine straight from 2018-2026.

All that history is part of what makes replacing the room bittersweet.

The conditions and adversity created by the old facility played a major role in cultivating the toughness associated with the Sunnyside dynasty. However, the administration and construction partners believe that the community and school’s investment in the next generation will continue to inspire success and the well-established winning tradition.

“I don’t want our kids to lose that grit that they grow up with and that they had when they came to this wrestling room,” Ponce explained. “But I also need them to understand that they deserve the world, and that’s what this is: it’s our community saying our kids deserve a top-notch, high-class wrestling room because that’s who they are.”

The convergence of Arizona’s greatest wrestling dynasty, now set to inherit the state’s newest and most state-of-the-art high school wrestling facility, offers incredible possibilities for the Blue Devils.

“I love the idea of a freshman walking in here, seeing those names and championships and immediately understanding this is what came before me,” Davenport said. “The idea of them thinking about how they get to be a part of (the success) that is coming next.”