T.J. Dudley: Rugged Individualist

The first time Kyle Kimrey saw T.J. Dudley was in middle school gym class.

Kimrey, a former three-time state champion at Dutch Fork and then the wrestling coach at Irmo High, was intrigued by what he saw and set about recruiting Dudley to the Yellow Jacket wrestling team.

“He was goofing around with a volleyball, but there was something about his athleticism and just the way he carried himself that made me think that he might become a good wrestler if he wanted to work at it,” said Kimrey, who is now an assistant coach at Lugoff-Elgin.

Dudley was all in.

“I was still playing football, but not really enjoying it because it was too regimented,” he said. “I had more fun playing pick-up football with my friends. I guess I’m just too much of an individual to like playing a team sport. I didn’t know anything about wrestling, but the one-on-one thing was interesting and, honestly, the violent aspect of it also appealed to me.”

Kimrey understood the attraction.

“T.J.’s a stubborn individualist, and I mean that in a good way,” he said. “He took to wrestling because he liked the fact that he would either succeed or fail based solely on his own preparation and performance.”

Dudley excelled from the outset, going 14-1 and winning a postseason title in his only middle school season. After a shaky start as a freshman, Dudley has developed into arguably the best high school wrestler the Midlands has ever produced.

Dudley went 36-15 as a freshman at Irmo with just a few months of experience, and made such rapid improvement that he finished fourth at 171 pounds at the state tournament.

“He was so inexperienced that he really took a beating in the first month of his freshman year,” said Kimrey. “But T.J. doesn’t like to lose. He kept scrapping. He started to figure things, have some success. He’s never looked back.”

From the start of the 2009-10 season through last weekend, Dudley has compiled a 150-2 record with more than 110 pins and two state championships in high school competition. He also had a streak of a season and a half without yielding a takedown.

He has raised the quality of his craft by competing during the offseason, including initial forays on the Freestyle and Greco-Roman circuits. He won a NHSCA junior national championship in March and became the second South Carolina entry to secure a title at the elite Super 32 preseason tournament in North Carolina in November. He is ranked No. 6 nationally at 195 pounds by hswestling.com

“When I first started wrestling during the off-season, it was a real eye-opener,” said Dudley. “I thought I was pretty good, but I quickly found out that wrestling outside of South Carolina was a different world. That’s when I realized that to be the best I had to work to be able to compete against the best.”

Dudley last lost in December of 2009 against former Lexington star Alex Morales.

He went 47-2 as a sophomore and won the 171-pound state title. He followed with a 45-0 showing while not allowing a takedown all season on the way to the 189 state championship. He is 58-0 this season, and he needs three more wins to top Morales’ career mark of 188 and become the winningest wrestler in Midlands history, according to scmat.com.

Dudley is Irmo’s career leader in wins and pins and is focused on becoming the program’s first three-time state champion next month.

Dudley will continue his wrestling career at the University of North Carolina, though he briefly was enamored that Iowa showed interest in him.

“One of my goals when I started to get serious about wrestling was to be at least be contacted by Iowa because of their reputation,” he said. “But I don’t think they were really serious about recruiting anybody from South Carolina and they didn’t offer me anything by financial aid. North Carolina is a better choice for me because of its location and the facilities there. They’ve just opened an Olympic wrestling training center. My dream is to someday compete in the Olympics.”

Kimrey said Dudley “is just starting to scratch the surface of his potential. He gets by a lot of the time now on his quickness and incredible balance. He’s still developing technique that can take him to the next level. There’s no reason to think he won’t get there.”