Andy has decades of High School coaching experience at Paonia High School including 5 state championships. His personal wrestling accomplishments include being a 4 time Division II All -American for University of Southern Colorado and a 1991 NAIA champion in 1991.

Andy Pipher still remembers traveling to youth wrestling tournaments with his family. Three Pipher brothers and their mom and dad, all spending weekends in their pickup camper at tournaments. Andy’s father was a coal miner on the Western Slope, but he somehow always found time to take the boys to tournaments.

“Mom cooked in the camper and the boys slept on the floor,” Andy said. “Most of the other families were in hotels, but I know this — when people saw that camper in the parking lot, they knew the Pipher boys were there.”

The Pipher boys made their mark. Those tournaments were the beginning of a wrestling career that saw Andy win a national title at the University of Southern Colorado before embarking on a coaching career that yielded one of the most impressive resumés in Colorado history.

“My dad instilled that work ethic in us that wrestling demanded,” Pipher said. “He taught us that you had to earn things in life. It made us tough and got us where we are. I wouldn’t have gone to college if it hadn’t been for wrestling.”

But Pipher did go to college, where he became a four-time All-American, including a national championship in 1991. He did get his degree, and he did become a teacher and coach — and he ended up building a program at Paonia that was consistently among the best at any level in Colorado for two decades.

In his 21 years there, Pipher’s Paonia squads won 10 regional titles and produced 16 top-five state tournament finishes, including five state titles. Paonia won three titles in a row (2012-13-14) and in 2014, crowned five individual state champs.

In 2015, Jesse Reed became Colorado’s 18th four-time state champ and a year later, Bo Pipher (Andy’s son) won his third state title and earned a scholarship to Penn State. Along the way, Andy was named the state’s 2A Coach of the Year four times and was the state’s all-division Coach of the Year in 2013.

“I obviously really enjoyed wrestling and loved the competitive aspect and preparation,” Andy said. “It was a great challenge. But when I started coaching, I loved it even more. It really changed the community. Winning is contagious and everyone wants to be a part of it … We were fortunate to have great support from administrators, families and the community and I had great assistant coaches. If it wasn’t for them, we never would have had the success we had.”

Pipher also had the fun of competing against his brother, Chuck, who was the head coach at rival Hotchkiss before later becoming the head coach at Colorado Mesa.

“If my dad hadn’t gotten us involved in wrestling, I don’t know what would have happened,” Andy said. “No doubt, my life would have turned out a whole lot differently. But when you look at how Bo went on to college and got his degree — the impact of wrestling has been generational on our family.”

Presenter- Steve Valdez