Before closing in 2007, Bowling Brook Preparatory School in Carroll County was a well respected school for juvenile offenders and had a reputation for turning around troubled youth with athletics.

One of its most surprising athletic achievements came in 1995, when in the wrestling team’s second year of existence it won the B Division championship at the first Maryland Independent State Wrestling Tournament.

But in the years that followed, the records from that first state tournament got lost, and when former Bowling Brook coach Jim Tavenner read about Archbishop Spalding’s state title victory in The Baltimore Sun last March, he was surprised to see Spalding, which now wrestles in the A Conference, credited with three B Division titles. He called to ask what years, and when he heard 1995, 1997 and 2008, he objected.

“Spalding did not win in 1995,” Tavenner said. “Bowling Brook won at the end of the night when Ronald Winder pined his guy at 171 to take fifth place.  The problem is that a few years later someone started using the box scores from an earlier edition that had Spalding in first place and Bowling Brook in third.”

A search of The Sun’s archives by researcher Paul McCardell found the documented final results of the tournament, showing Bowling Brook finished 16th in the overall standings with 59 points (tops in the B Conference), while Spalding finished 17th with 56.5.

“Let me tell why this is important to me,” said Tavenner, who actually started his coaching career at Spalding. “I was the head coach at Bowling Brook from 1994-2000. We won the B division in 1995, 1996, 1999 and 2000. We did that with court-involved kids with no wrestling experience. They worked very hard to achieve that goal. I was so proud of those guys and the guys from the other teams I coached at the Brook. But that first championship was a special one for me.

“I am very happy for Spalding. I had no idea they had become so good and I’m pleased. Though they have no idea who I am, I feel I had a small part in laying the foundation they’re built on. I just want to set the record straight. Bowling Brook doesn’t exist anymore, and there is no one there to stand up for them. But my guys worked very hard to achieve the goal to be champions and they deserve to be recognized.”

Current Spalding coach Mike Laidley, who coached his team to a perfect record and No. 1 ranking last season, said he is happy that any discrepancy has been resolved.

“Absolutely,” said Laidley, who was not associated with the school in 1995. “Wrestling is a difficult sport, to say the least. It takes a lot of hard work to win a championship and anyone who earns that achievement should be fairly recognized.”

Henry Franklin, a member of the Maryland State Wrestling Association, who works with the Maryland Independent Schools State Tournament that will be held Friday and Saturday at McDonogh, said the official records have been corrected to reflect Bowling Brook’s championship.

“It makes us happy to make the correction,” said Franklin. “We want our records to be accurate.”

Tavenner said it is understandable how records from that 1995 night could have been inaccurate, recalling there was an ice storm and the event ran very late. Spalding was leading the B competition for most of the evening, and no one expected Bowling Brook to pull an upset. But when a 103 pound match between a Spalding and a Mount St. Joseph wrestler went to Mount St. Joseph (which won the A title), it opened the door for Bowling Brook.

Bowling Brook had two wrestlers still alive in the consolation rounds. It needed a pin from Winder (171) and got it, and then what Tavenner calls “a funny thing” happened in the 189 pound match.

“My guy Darius Boyles was going up against a kid from Calvert Hall who had pinned him earlier in the season,” Tavenner said. “The Calvert Hall kid’s family had hired a photographer to take pictures. I pointed it out to Darius and I saw a side of him I’d never seen before. He pinned that kid and both he and Ronald took fifth and we clinched the title.”

It was the first of four B Division crowns in six years.

Tavenner, who now works as a compliance manager in Hanover, Pa., started at Spalding, taking over a team that was entering its second season, had only four wrestlers and had never won a match. That season, Tavenner led the Cavaliers to a .500 record before leaving to go back to the University of Baltimore to complete his education degree. After working in the business world for six years, he realized he missed teaching and wanted to get back into coaching. He sent out resume’s and Bowling Brook responded.

“The school was for chronic youth offenders,” he said. “The kids were kids no one else wanted to deal with. In my opinion it was one of the greatest places to teach. You had to be disciplined. But you could see results. I saw kids go from a second and third grade reading level to getting their GEDs in 10 months. I’d been gone from there a long time when that student died [before the school closed], but from my perspective the teachers there were wonderful and the misguided kids who came to Bowling Brook found their way. I heard not long ago, one kid I helped get into college has passed the Bar.”

When Tavenner came to Bowling Brook, there were just 39 students at the school. And when in 1994 it was decided he should start a wrestling team, the coach found a few students who wanted to wrestled and was given the school’s junior varsity basketball team to fill out the roster.

“We tried to schedule practices so the kids who wanted to continue playing basketball could do that too,” Tavenner recalled. “We’d practice some mornings at 5 a.m. We were real basic. No one had any wrestling experience. So we taught very basic moves, double and single legs. And we drilled it over and over. Nothing too complicated. Our goal was to be the best conditioned and most disciplined team out there and hope things would fall into place.”

Tavenner, 49, has no memory of how his team did during dual meets, but says, “We didn’t win many. We had no lower weights. Sometimes we’d be down 30-0 before we sent our first wrestler on the mat. But the purpose of the team was to expose our guys to a positive experience. If we won, we won and if we lost, we lost, but we’d learn good lessons along the way.”