More than a year later, Wilsonville teen athlete gone but not forgotten | Community Spirit

WILSONVILLE, Ore. -- Brad Holly is busy Friday afternoon.

He's moving chairs around, setting up tables and taking phone calls at the Stafford Woods Conference Center in Wilsonville. He's trying to fine-tune every detail. After all, it's all for his son, Colton.

Colton Holly was a student-athlete at Wilsonville High School. It was the summer of 2010 and he had just finished his sophomore year when he took a trip down to Sweet Home with the Wildcats wrestling team. After a workout, the team took a dip in a nearby reservoir. After the swim, the team began to walk back to their campsite when they noticed Holly, a vivacious, outgoing teenager, wasn't with them. They looked all around and eventually went back to the reservoir where they found Colton had drowned.

Now, more than 18 months later, the Holly family, along with the entire Wilsonville wrestling community, will host a fund-raiser dinner and auction Saturday for the Colton Holly Scholarship Fund. The Holly family -- Brad, his wife Samantha and their daughter who is nearly six years old -- needed a way to funnel their grief over the tragic death of Colton into something positive. It gave the family something to do and also served as a catalyst to do some good in the world. A scholarship fund seemed like a perfect fit because of Colton's love for competition and sports.

"Sports played such an important role in his life," Brad Holly said. "He kind of struggled in high school when he first got there and sports were kind of the one thing that pulled it all together for him. (The scholarships) just kind of made sense to us at the time and that's how it kind of started."

Still, there were tough times around the Holly household after the accident. The Hollys relied on family for support. Friends, along with members from both Brad and Samantha's side of the family, either drove or flew to Wilsonville for support. Some stayed for a week. Others stayed for a month. All helped with the day-to-day needs of the family, while Colton's parents attempted to process the tragic event.

"The community itself was amazing, the wrestling community especially, but the greater Wilsonville community as a whole would bring us meals and things," Brad Holly said. "It kind of gave us a month or two to really just kind of figure it all out. I don't think you can ever really figure it all out, but it gave us that time to at least deal with it, is the best way to put it. Shortly after everything kind of subsided is when we came up with the scholarship fund."

Colton the jokester and fierce competitor

To those who knew Colton the best, he was the life of the party. He was outgoing and social -- just as long as he wasn't on the wrestling mat. Colton had the ability to turn his steely determination on the mat on and off. Off the mat, he was a fun, lovable teen. When he put on his singlet and wrestling shoes to step into the circle, he was an intense, strong-willed wrestler.

"When it came time to wrestle, nothing else mattered at that point," Brad Holly said. "He could turn it off and turn it on to game-mode and he wrestled at 110 percent every time."

Wilsonville High School wrestling coach Jason Milham didn't often see the jokester side of Colton much, simply because the team was usually engrossed in wrestling, a sport renowned for the gritty determination it bestows upon its athletes. However, Milham said he noticed Colton's sense of humor during the down times of wrestling tournaments or bus rides. One particular time, Milham saw Colton's non-wrestling personality. At a tournament in Woodburn during his sophomore year, Colton was sick. Coaches knew he was sick, but didn't know he was on the verge of vomiting. Brad Holly knew he was sick and told his son he should stay home from the tournament. To Colton, that was unthinkable.

"He did not want to miss any meets and let his team down," Brad Holly said.

During the tournament, he wrestled his match, then came back to the stands near his teammates to lay down and fall asleep until his next match. Later after a match, he threw up in the restroom and then returned to the bleachers near his teammates.

"Then he made some comment to the team about them all being a bunch of wimps," Milham said laughing. "But then he went back and fell back asleep because he had just gotten up, kind of staggered down to the mat and I think he ended up pinning the kid ... So even though he was feeling crappy, he was still joking with them and setting a great example in the process."

During the season

Since the death of Colton, the Holly family, who moved from Sherwood to Wilsonville in 2004, has been a staple at Wilsonville wrestling events. The family went to the home dual meets this year and were honored Feb. 2 prior to the team's final regular-season home matchup (known as "senior night") when seniors are highlighted for their dedication to the program.

"It's hard. We were very close with a lot of the families and a lot of his friends, but we still go to a lot of the wrestling meets just because it's kind of important to us and to support the team because the team has been incredibly supportive," Brad Holly said. "It's exciting to be out there watching the other kids wrestle, but at the same time, it's kind of a bittersweet memory because you kind of imagine what it would be like with Colton out there on the mat wrestling. The coaches all had a lot of high hopes for him, so that's also a bittersweet part of it."

Milham and the Wilsonville wrestling program also put together an annual tournament in January -- the Colton Holly Memorial Tournament -- to honor the student who would've been training this week to prepare for Wilsonville's upcoming regional tournament next weekend. Top finishers there earn a berth into the state tournament that is held Feb. 24-25 at Memorial Coliseum in Portland.

"They're great people," Milham said. "They've taken a senseless tragedy and have done their best to turn it into something positive. It's good for the team, the kids and the coaches to see them around and being supportive."

Milham thinks about Colton frequently.

"You know how it is when someone's in your life and then they're not," he said. "For these kinds of reasons, it pops up at weird times and you think about it. Sometimes I'll be driving to school and thinking about wrestling or our regional tournament or the kids and I'll think about him. Or if something is going on in practice and a kid will do something or say something and it'll make you think about him, so I don't know if it's unique to this time of the season. I think it's common, at least for me, to think about him at random times."

The aftermath

With Saturday's event rapidly approaching, Brad Holly is expecting approximately 100 people to be in attendance for the fund-raiser, which has grown substantially. When the fund-raiser was held for the first time last year, the Wilsonville community showed unwavering support. Ideally, Brad Holly said, he was hoping the fund-raiser would garner somewhere between $2,000-$5,000, which would help local athletic teams and give two $1,000 scholarships to graduating high school students. In the end, $10,000 was raised and when the two recipients of the scholarship accepted what they thought would be $1,000 scholarships, they were surprised to learn they both received $3,000 scholarships. It was all in part to the generosity of the community, Brad Holly said.

"It was great," he said. "And then we made donations to local Wilsonville youth sports and to the wrestling team because they do some summer camps because if there's a kid who really wants or needs to go to a wrestling camp in the summer but can't afford it, we take care of it."

Organizers also donated to the local Wilsonville youth lacrosse foundation (Colton was an active player), providing gear for youth who might not be able to afford the expensive lacrosse equipment. But the giving didn't just stop in the realm of athletics. Around the Christmas holiday, organizers adopted some local families and bought them food baskets, presents and other items. Organizers also made donations to the local food bank in Wilsonville.

"They've made the most positive thing out of this whole situation as anyone could," Milham said of the Holly family. "I think it's a testament to the people they are. I think it says something about the community of Wilsonville, too, because people have offered things to support kids in the community and college efforts for our high school kids. It's amazing to me. You ask yourself, 'Could you do that in that situation?' You hope so because they've been just so incredible with the things they're doing. It makes me smile just to think about it. They reflect the kid Colton was. The people they are says a lot about the kid their son was because he was a great kid and their actions show they're great people."