Inductees
Ned Blass
Year: 1997
Gender: Male
About Ned:
A member of the Ponca City High School Hall of Fame, Tulsa Edison High School Hall of Fame and the Citizens Savings Athletic Hall of Fame, Ned Blass spent 40 years in the sport, from the time he began wrestling to when he finished his coaching career in 1982.
A two-sport standout at Ponca City High School, Blass had offers to play football from Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Nebraska and more, but ultimately decided to leave them behind and pursue wrestling at Oklahoma State. In his four years at OSU, he went 28-3-1 and won back-to-back championships at 177 pounds in 1953 and 1954.
Soon after graduating from OSU, he became a player-coach at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, California, where he qualified to be an alternate for the 1956 U.S. Olympic team. It was during that time when he grew a love for coaching, that led him to spend the next 30 years of his life as a coach and send multiple wrestlers to big-time college programs, including Charlie White at Oklahoma and Cowboy legends J Robinson and Roy Brewer.
He returned to Oklahoma State in 1958 when Cowboy head coach Myron Roderick hired Blass as an assistant coach. After his one-year stint under Roderick, he took the head coaching job at Tulsa Central High School where he would begin his head coaching career in Oklahoma and California.
He finished his coaching career in California where he had long stints as the wrestling coach at Mt. Miguel High School and Valhalla High School. He left the wrestling program at Valhalla in 1984 to move into an administrator role as a vice principal and eventually a principal at Granite Hills High School.