Miller Sipes joined a pretty exclusive club when he won the 16U Greco-Roman championship at the 2024 USA Wrestling Junior and 16U National Championships in Fargo, North Dakota.
The junior-to-be at Staley High School became only the school’s third-ever Fargo champion. The two before him? Missouri standouts Rocky Elam and Zach Elam.
“It’s pretty great (to join them), but I want to build my own legacy,” Sipes said. “To just know if I keep working and keep working and really dedicate myself to wrestling I could be really, really good and just keep following the footsteps of people that had been in front of me before.”
Sipes is well on his way. In his first two years of high school wrestling, he’s placed third and second in Class 4. His only losses at the state meet have come against the state champion.
Now, he added a national championship and was an All-American in freestyle on his first trip to the FargoDome.
“It is crazy because I’ve always thought about it growing up and it as a goal that was super hard to reach, but then it just kind of happened,” said Sipes, who wrestled in the 138-pound brackets. “I wasn’t really expecting it but it just happened because I took one match at a time.”
The title almost didn’t happen. Sipes sustained a collarbone injury in the round of 64, a 10-1 win.
“I was going to injury default out of the tournament but I told my parents I would wrestle in the round of 32 and just kind of see what it was like,” he said. “I ended up going out there and taking the kid down in like 30 seconds so it gave me a lot of confidence going into the next match.”
He pinned Vinnie Gutierrez of California in 33 seconds and then beat Austin Ellis from Utah by a 6-5 decision to reach the quarterfinals.
Another pin followed in the quarterfinals in 1:13 before a win on criteria in the semifinals against Marcus Kilgore from Arizona.
In the finals was Jovani Solis, a Florida state champion at 132 pounds.
“Going into the match wasn’t as nervous,” Sipes said. “I mean, I was pretty calm. We went back to the hotel and kind of chilled out and got something to eat. I kind of just thought of it as, like, even if I do lose, I still made the finals. There’s nothing to hang your head about.”
Sipes went out and posted a 5-3 win over Solis to claim one of three Greco titles for Missouri.
“Anytime you have a tournament that is that big, it’s 132-man brackets, 256-man brackets, or whatever it is, winning those huge brackets is freaking tough,” Staley coach Elisha Bears said. “Because it’s a meat grinder. You are stringing five or six matches together against high-quality opponents from around the country. I think that if there was a kid who was capable of doing it, I think it was Miller, just because of the way that he trained, and the way that he went about his business this spring and into the summer after Cadets. He wrestled really well there and wrestled some of the top guys in the country. So we knew that he could beat anyone.”
His lone loss in Greco-Roman at 16U National Duals in June came in his first match and then he won eight in a row. He went 7-1 in the same event in freestyle to earn 5th place All-American status.
At Fargo, Sipes went 7-2 and made the quarterfinals before a 5-2 loss to Iowa’s Justis Jesuroga — who beat him at 16U National Duals as well. From there, Sipes went 3-1 and took fifth with a 5-2 win over Carlos Valdiviezo from California. The loss was against Ellis, which he avenged in the Greco portion.
“When you’re wrestling the high-quality kids from around the country, you know, you can take some losses,” Bears said. “It happens; you may be a little off or they just might be really damn good. He did a good job of, I think, compartmentalizing and staying with his game plan. He stuck with his game plan.”
Just days after wrestling ended, he was back in Kansas City and going through football camp for the Falcons as a safety. He juggled summer workouts for football while training for Fargo and other tournaments.
Sipes trained with Brian Graham with Graham Greco, while also working out with Mo West Championship Wrestling Club and Greater Heights Wrestling this summer.
“He was hitting up all those practices and he was practicing three or four days a week and getting runs in on his own,” Bears said. “Getting his lifts in after a tough high school season. That’s not easy mentally, to do, and then he just carried that into the summer. So he had built himself a great foundation, and he had success because of it.”
However, in football season Sipes is a football player and in wrestling season, he’s a wrestler, Bears said. Sipes won’t be going to Super 32 like some of his contemporaries on the mat.
“He loves football but he’s pretty damn good at wrestling, but I think football is his first love,” Bears said. “But wrestling is important to him too and he communicated that with both Coach (Drew) Hudgins (football coach at Staley) and I and we made it work.”
