Submitted photo Kenny Bailey, right, with former Canfield wrestling state champion Jim Jones when Jones was inducted into the Eastern Ohio Wrestling League Hall of Fame this past season. Bailey, 65, passed away earlier this week.

Kenny Bailey met a young kid back in 1991. His name was Stephen Pitts, and it was the 5-year-old’s first day at wrestling practice.

“(We) grow up dreaming of meeting a super hero,” said Pitts, now the wrestling coach at Canfield High School, one of the area’s premier wrestling programs. “Someone bigger than life who can solve all the world’s problems. I am lucky enough to have met one in real life. That was Kenny Bailey.”

Pitts is one of hundreds of people who owe their love of wrestling to Bailey, who passed away on Sunday after a bout with cancer. He was 66.

The Jackson-Milton graduate, along with his lifelong friend, Tom Hernan, put together a youth wrestling league in the Mahoning Valley back in the early 1990s. The two had sons involved in the sport and grew tired of driving all over Ohio (and to nearby states) for wrestling tournaments, so they created their own branch of the Ohio Youth Wrestling League.

“We used to drive up to Marlington and Alliance, and we said, ‘Well, why don’t we just do it here?’,” recalled Hernan, who first met Bailey in peewee football. “Kenny was a big part of organizing all of that and putting it together. Kids have been wrestling (in youth leagues at Austintown and Canfield) for 30 years, and it never would’ve happened. That really upgraded the wrestling in the Youngstown area, especially at schools like Canfield and Austintown. There are a handful of coaches that wrestled in that youth league. John Burd from Austintown. Obviously, Stephen.

“That was all what Kenny put together.”

And he did it without ever wrestling growing up.

Bailey starred in basketball and football at Jackson-Milton High School. After graduating, he moved around a bit, and Hernan said the two went their separate ways for a few years before randomly reconnecting in Houston, Texas.

“I moved down there for construction, and Kenny was doing sheet metal work, but we weren’t really in touch with each other,” Hernan said. “One day, my wife is going through at checkout line at a store, and Cindy, Kenny’s wife, was working there and recognized my wife. …

“And that’s how we hooked up in Houston. It was like a million-to-one shot.”

The two friends picked up where they left off and eventually ended up moving back to the Mahoning Valley.

With children around the same age and involved in wrestling, they started taking them to different tournaments before organizing their own. It began in Canfield, with around eight teams, Hernan said, but it soon grew to the point they had to move out of the Cardinals’ gym and into a larger one at Austintown Fitch (there are now leagues at both schools).

It was around this time that Jim Jones was wrestling at Canfield. He won a state championship for the Cardinals, and as the one of the area’s elite athletes, several young wrestlers looked up to Jones. That that soon led to a connection with Bailey.

“He was at every match,” said Jones, whose friendship continued for the rest of Bailey’s life. “He was at every state championship. Kenny Bailey never missed a high school state championship for Canfield, ever. He cheered on every Canfield kid that ever won a state championship. I was with him.”

Aside from organizing the youth league, Bailey was a successful youth coach as well.

While he wasn’t a former wrestler himself, he learned the sport at an older age from Jones, Hernan, who wrestled for Fitch, and several others. He also studied books and videos and went to clinics to further his knowledge of wrestling. He eventually brought clinics to the Mahoning Valley, along with some of the nation’s top wrestlers, who would direct the classes.

The more involved he became in the sport, the more his passion grew.

“He just picked everything up so fast,” Jones said. “And he was one of those guys who would buy tapes, buy this, buy that. He was at tournaments every weekend, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia. He was taking kids everywhere, every open mat, so he just learned so much.

“He was so stubborn, he just willed himself to be a good coach.”

His tactics worked.

Bailey’s son, Lee, placed third in the state in 1996, and Canfield has become one of the state’s top Division II wrestling schools over the last two decades. The Cardinals finished second as a team three straight years at the individual state wrestling tournament (2016-18) and crowned 10 state champs since 1996.

It was all initiated by a man who never stepped foot on a wrestling mat in high school.

“Never wrestled himself, and he loved that sport more than anybody,” Jones said. “That was the amazing thing about it.”

Apparently, it was one of Bailey’s many amazing attributes.