Success comes full circle for Stewart brothers, Bees

Each individual on a wrestling team is as unique as each child in a family.

Zeb and Eli Stewart, the first two of five brothers to come through the Brookville wrestling program, are a perfect example.

“They’re two different types of wrestlers,” Brookville coach Don Shuler said. “Usually, you wrestle your personality. Eli’s more technical and low-key. Zeb, being the first son, he’s more type-A and driven. He gets after it.”

Ten years separate Warren Stewart’s five sons.

Zeb, a junior ranked No. 1 in the state among Group AA wrestlers with a 34-1 record at 130 pounds, is 17. Eli, a sophomore wrestling at 119 pounds, is 16.

Luke, an eighth-grader who placed third in the middle school state tournament this season, wrestling at 95 pounds, is 13.

Then there’s Reid, 10, and Hudson, 7, who both compete for the Bees Wrestling Club, where their older brothers got their start.

Each one is a little bit different from the other, with the youngest among the wildest and most restless on the mat.

“I’m really excited about Hudson and Reid,” Zeb said. “Reid’s pretty funky as a wrestler — he used to have real long hair that just flew all around. Hudson’s like a Ninja when he wrestles. He usually jumps over a kid before he takes him down.”

“He only knows two moves and one of them is a steamroll,” Eli added. “That’s how he pins guys.”

“His moves are unorthodox, but really effective,” Zeb added.

Their father, Warren, who serves as an assistant under Shuler at Brookville, introduced his five sons to the sport and has seen each develop their own style.

“I’ve trained them the same way, taught them the same fundamentals and techniques, and … they all wrestle completely differently,” he said. “They use the same techniques, but it just looks different because of their body type and personality.”

Eli has never beaten Zeb in a practice match. He only has taken his older brother down once or twice during sparring sessions, and that was when Zeb let him do it.

But he’s just as competitive, as brothers and sibling rivals usually are.

“I beat him at a lot of other things,” Eli said. “I’m much faster than him and I beat him in sprints.”

He also claims to be much more extreme — he’s into mountain biking and I used to compete on the trampoline in gymnastics — and better looking.

In wrestling, he more than holds his own within in his weight class, going 31-4.

Both are No. 1 seeds entering Saturday’s Seminole District tournament at Amherst, where the Bees will try to capture their 40th consecutive tournament title after finishing in a three-way tie with Jefferson Forest and Staunton River in the regular season.

Zeb and Eli have benefited from having one another in the lineup, as have their teammates.

“When you have wrestlers like Zeb and Eli, the guys around them get better, too,” Shuler said.

Zeb, who placed fourth in the Group AA state tournament as a sophomore at 125 pounds before finishing third at 130 last winter, has great ambitions in the sport.

“I pray every night I’ll be a two-time state champion and a three-time national champion in college and then an Olympic champion,” he said.

“He’s just gotten better and better, wrestling all year round,” Shuler added.

Zeb draws strength and courage from his father, who a former Marine Corps sniper in Beirut who later won an NCAA Division II national title as a 142-pounder wrestling for Shuler at Liberty University in 1988 before qualifying for the NCAA Division I tournament his final three seasons.

“He’s somebody I will always look up to,” Zeb said of Warren. “I’d love to go wrestle at LU, wherever I can get a scholarship to wrestle.”

Eli isn’t quite as certain about his future plans.

“I do want to wrestle in college (but) I want to do some stuff after college,” he said.

Both were introduced to the sport at early ages, fascinated by high school wrestlers from E.C. Glass and Franklin County when Warren served as head coach at those two schools.

They started rough-housing with their father and the younger siblings eventually joined in the fray.

“He wrestles all of us sometimes and beats us up,” Zeb said.

“We would do everything we could to keep him down and he would do everything he could to keep us from getting away,” Eli added.

Sometimes, their living-room tag-team family bouts would get carried away, though Warren may have sustained the most serious of injuries.

“We would jump off different pieces of furniture to try to hurt him so one of us could get out,” Zeb said. “It was always fun.”

Rather than joining different soccer teams, which would have meant shuttling between different teams at different times, the Stewarts followed their father’s footsteps onto the wrestling mat, competing for the Bees Wrestling Club.

“My dad has always been in it and it’s something our whole family can do together,” Zeb said. “It’s something we love and can do as a family.”

“When we travel to tournaments, my dad can be a part of it,” Eli added.

The Stewarts have grown closer as brothers, tied by bonds formed on the wrestling mat.

And their family has come full circle through the wrestling ranks, with the sons wrestling at Brookville for the same coach who mentored their father at LU.

“Don does an amazing job with the kids,” Warren said. “Don is probably the best coach in the area in any sport (because) he coaches character into the kids. He wants them to be the best people they can be.

“I owe a lot to Don,” he added, noting he both challenged him physically and influenced him spiritually during his career at LU. “He practically parented me and he is now influencing my kids the way he did me.

“I trust him implicitly with my kids,” he added. “He’s concerned for them and wants what’s best for them. It’s a win-win situation. We wouldn’t be in it if it weren’t for him.”