When the lights in the gym turn off and the spotlight turns on, everything else melts away.
For the Akins wrestling team, the spotlight shining down from the ceiling puts the focus on just them and their opponents. Along with that, it also adds an extra bit of drama to each wrestling match, which is already a mental game as much as it is a physical contest of strength and agility.
Senior Diego Moreno, who has been on the Akins wrestling team for 4 years, said the spotlight allows him to focus on his opponent more, rather than having the distraction of everything around you.
“It’s nice how you don’t feel like everyone is watching you, it’s just you vs. the other guy you’re going against,” Moreno said.
So far the spotlight has only been used once in December, during the Akins wrestling team’s Senior Night match, which was the last time it had a tournament at Akins this year. However, the addition of the spotlight made the matches even more memorable for the team members who have worked to raise money over several years for its installation.
The spotlight was the brainchild of former Akins wrestling coach Roy Tambunga, who retired at the end of the last school year after coaching at Akins for more than 20 years.
Tambunga said he first saw a spotlight used in a wrestling match in a movie he saw in the 1980s called Vision Quest.
“One of my favorite movies is called Vision Quest,” he said. “Whenever we would make it to regionals it was kind of a tradition that we would all get in my room and I would show them the movie.”
The movie is about a high school wrestler defending a state championship, and in the movie the wrestling team had a spotlight for its matches. This was Tambunga’s first inspiration. A few years later when the team would go to duels or tris he noticed that some of the wealthier schools had spotlights, including Anderson, Navarro, and Bowie. After a few talks with the coaches at those schools and some research, Tambunga made it a goal to get a spotlight installed at Akins.
To earn the money, the team members worked at UT games which they did for around 10 years. For the last three years, the Akins wrestlers started hosting local wrestling tourna- ments, including those held at the Delco Center, where they could make around $10,000 just in concessions and working the front doors. Tambunga said the team members loved working the events and didn’t even consider it as work.
The team was finally able to purchase the spotlight during the 2023-2024 school year. And then it took almost another year to get the spotlight installed because it involved electricians and getting permits to do the work. After Tambunga retired at the end of May, the responsibility to get the spotlight installed fell to Akins co-athletic coordinators Joey Saxe and Amanda Thomas, who also took over coaching responsibilities for the Akins wrestling team.
Saxe said he ran into complications because the district electricians didn’t want to climb up on the tall lift needed to reach the ceiling in the gym. The district also has very strict rules about adding such a big expense to the school.
“I would say it took 12 months of back and forth with the district, lots of work orders, lots of visiting with architectural design teams, electrical teams, roofing teams,” Saxe said.
Despite all the challenges of the installation, the team agrees it was worth it. Senior Vincenzo Moreno described how it feels to go against an opponent under the spotlight.
“(It’s) not always gonna feel like people are watching you,” he said. “But you don’t worry about them, you worry about yourself and what you are doing at that very moment.”
Although the spotlight has not been used much yet, it has finally been brought to Akins. After much hard work to accomplish it, Tambunga’s dream has finally come true. Now future generations of Akins high school wrestlers can have the concentration a spotlight brings to use for their matches.
