Hillsboro's 'legacy family.' Echeverrias look to add more entries to Forever Wall at 5A Oregon wrestling championships
By René Ferrán | Photos by Leon Neuschwander
Arturo and Antonio Echeverria never contributed a point at an OSAA state championship for the Hillsboro wrestling program.
Nevertheless, the twin brothers’ legacy within the Spartans resonates every day in the wrestling room tucked between the two gyms.
There, Arturo’s sons Sebastian and Preston and Antonio’s son, Jaden, and daughter Kaydence grapple daily, with two more siblings — Arturo Jr., an eighth grader, and Tony Jr., the 9-year-old baby of the group — in the pipeline.
Preston (182 pounds), Sebastian (220) and Jaden (285) won district titles last weekend at the Northwest Oregon championships in Canby. Preston (32-3) and Sebastian (32-3) enter this week’s OSAA Class 5A state tournament as No. 2 seeds, while Jaden (29-4) is the top seed in his bracket.
Left to right: Jaden, Preston and Sebastian Echeverria
They all find themselves on Hillsboro’s Forever Wall — Jaden and Sebastian first making it as sophomores in 2021, with Preston adding his name last year.
Now, they hope to become the program’s first boys state champions since Jaiven Rodriguez and Hunter Morse in 2016.
“I wouldn’t hesitate to say they’re a legacy family in a heartbeat,” said Spartans coach Stephen Moreno. “Very few programs can say that, right?”
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Antonio and Arturo entered Hillsboro High in the late 1990s as a couple of knuckleheads. Antonio acknowledged “we were troublemakers,” until one day during their freshman year when legendary Spartans coach Ron James pulled them aside.
“We were always getting into fights, but Coach James, he brought us into this wrestling atmosphere,” Antonio said. “He was like this father figure to us, and he would have us go to practice. He would even give us a ride home, and he was there for us. And while we weren’t successful like our boys, we liked it.”
So much so that after Antonio and Arturo started their families a few years later, they entered Sebastian and Jaden, and then Preston, into Hillsboro Mat Club when they turned 4 years old.
The brothers then joined with their former teammate and good friend, Nick Salzman, to coach their sons (Nick’s son, Skyler, placed at state last year and won a district title over the weekend) in the youth program until turning them over to the full-time coaches as they reached middle school.
“We just loved the competitiveness of the sport,” Antonio said. “And we wanted our kids to have an opportunity that we didn’t have. Our parents, when they came over here from Mexico and got their citizenship, they didn’t really put us into that, but we wanted our kids to be successful in life.
“So, we put them in football and wrestling and track, and I think it helped them stay out of trouble and be where they’re at.”
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The cousins spread out in Coach Moreno’s office, finding space to sit down. Preston finds a chair nearest the wall, while Sebastian plops into the top half of a comfy office seat that had been removed from the base, positioning it near the office door.
Jaden pulls out a tall stool that has him center stage in the middle of the room. He’s definitely the talker of the family, the first to answer questions and heap praise upon his cousins to either side.
It’s not about bragging rights or who’s up and who’s down between the three of them, however.
“It’s more about being proud of putting our last name out there,” Jaden said. “You know, so that we’re being remembered.”
Hillsboro’s Forever Wall
Jaden has placed twice at state, taking fourth at 195 pounds at the OWA meet as a sophomore and fifth at 182 at last winter’s OSAA meet in Redmond.
“I think a lot of people doubted me and didn’t think I’d make the Forever Wall,” Jaden said. “I think I shocked a bunch of people. I even shocked myself. And just to see my dad’s face, he was crying, and he was just super proud of this. It was like the best feeling.”
This season, he moved up to the heavyweight division, where Jaden regularly gives up close to 80 pounds to his competitors. In that way, he resembles last year’s 5A state champion, Riley Godek of Crescent Valley, who also was a natural 220-pounder but wrestled up to give the team its best chance of success.
“Jaden told me on Day 1 of the season that he wanted to be the heavyweight champion,” said Moreno, who dubbed him HC following that conversation. “I told him that we would have to drop his other weight classes (in Oregon’s weight management system) and that he could think about it, because he could go all the way down to 182.
“I was trying to be polite. I wasn’t doubting him for a second. I just said, ‘Let me know, and I can start dropping them,’ and he said, ‘You can drop them now.’ And the amount of work he’s done, the technical ability he’s added to his game these last two years, especially this year, the growth he’s shown as a person, the maturity he’s shown, it’s pretty cool.”
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That leaves 220 to Sebastian alone. Last year, Sebastian became the first Echeverria family member to reach a state final, following his sixth-place finish as a sophomore to go up against longtime rival Vaun Halstead of Thurston.
He wrestled that meet with a wrecked left knee suffered at district the previous week. He gutted through three matches, wearing an enormous brace that couldn’t stop the knee from swelling and popping ibuprofen every couple of hours for the pain.
So, while Halstead won a 7-1 decision, he made a point of praising how much Sebastian had improved since pinning him as a sophomore in the state semifinals.
“That was the best I’d ever wrestled him,” Sebastian recalled. “Every other time, I got sacked and pinned against him. I came off the mat knowing I did everything I could. It felt good to see that I had made a lot of improvement, especially with my knee how it was at the time.”
Injured knee or not, the Monday after the team returned from Redmond, Sebastian was back in the weight room, relishing the idea of a rematch against Halstead in the state final this weekend.
“That’s the hardest I’ve ever hit the gym before, and I haven’t stopped since,” Sebastian said.
He continues to arrive every morning around 6 a.m. with his cousins to get in a workout before taking his online college courses.
Sebastian won’t get the opportunity to avenge his loss to Halstead, though, as the Colts senior dropped to 195 for the postseason. That leaves Sebastian’s main competition in the state bracket as three-time state champion Hayden Walters of Crater, who’s just returning from a two-month layoff from a dislocated wrist.
There’s also Silverton sophomore Brash Henderson, who finished third at 220 last year, and Mountain View senior Alex Garcia-Ortega, sixth at the 6A meet in 2022.
Whoever comes up in the bracket, however, should know one thing.
“Those semifinals, that finals match, will be everything I’ve got,” Sebastian said. “In my head, there’s no other option. I’ve put in way too much work.”
“It’s one of the deepest of all 14 weight classes,” Moreno added. “And I think that’s motivating for Sebastian. For some wrestlers, it might not be, but for Sebastian, it just motivates him to work harder.”
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While Jaden and Sebastian thrive by trying to overpower their opponents, each called Preston “the most technically sound wrestler” of the trio. It paid off with a third-place finish at state last year and a spot in the Reser’s Tournament of Champions finals this month, where he lost to West Linn’s nationally ranked senior, Justin Rademacher.
Even then, Preston showed off his technical prowess, surprising Rademacher with a leg shot and a takedown in the first period.
“Even at younger ages, he was always smart, thinking about what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it,” Jaden said.
Preston Echeverria
Preston is also the quietest of the cousins, preferring to let his work do his talking. For example, in the third-place match at state last year, he avenged a district final loss to Scappoose’s Trey Dieringer, pulling out a 5-2 decision that “showed me how much I’ve grown and what I’m actually capable of.
“Because in matches before that, I was like scared to hit moves because he was a lot bigger than me. And I just told myself from then on, I wasn’t going to be scared.”
The 182 bracket, like the heavyweight field, appears wide open. Preston is seeded behind Mountain View’s Liam Byrne, who reached the 160 final in 6A last year, with Dallas junior Cole Langford (third at 5A 182) and Silverton senior Steven Powell (fifth at 5A 160) also in the bracket.
While Jaden and Sebastian head off to college wrestling this year — both have been talking with Pacific University as well as several smaller schools in the Midwest — Preston will be back next season, joined by Kaydence (who missed the second half of the season in concussion protocol) and Arturo Jr., who wrestles at 160 and “wants to be like his cousin and his brothers,” Antonio said. “He’s in there, you know, competing with them and seeing who’s the best.”
Then, in a few years, it’ll be Baby Tony, who’s already racking up the wins as a 9-year-old.
“Especially in my conference, people are going to start wondering where we’re finding all these Echeverrias,” Moreno joked. “But they’re the same two families. They’re the legacy family of Hillsboro High School.”
