Photo courtesy of Dallas ISD.
Since the return of a wrestling program at Justin F. Kimball High School head coach Devon “Buck” Fortson has sent his athletes to the UIL Wrestling State Tournament for 23 consecutive years.
This year’s tournament was extra special, inducting Fortson into the 2026 Texas High School Wrestling Coaches Association Hall of Honor.
As a former student-athlete and Kimball alumnus himself, he competed for the very school he now serves as coach. In 1982, he was named Kimball High School’s Class of 1982’s Most Valuable Athlete.
After attending Richland Junior College as a wrestler, he continued his education at West Texas State University, earning a Division I scholarship for football. He returned to Kimball High School as a teacher’s assistant in 1997.
Between his college experience and his start to teaching, Kimball High School’s wrestling program vanished.
“The disappearance came because even when the program started in ’78, the football coach kind of shunned up on wrestling because they thought it’d take away from them all season. So the football and the wrestling coach was kind of like battling during that time,” Fortson said.
While the program was successful, he said it was ultimately up to the athletic director to decide not to have wrestling at that time. Fortson said the Kimball wrestling program died down in 1986 and he brought it back by coaching both wrestling and football, giving kids another avenue to be successful in because of the sport’s accessibility.
“I could be blind. I could have no legs, one leg. (Anthony) Robles, NCAA champion with one leg,” Fortson said. “So that sport gave me an avenue to say ‘I don’t care how you look, I don’t care which handicap you have. You could do this sport, and no other sport allows you to do that like wrestling.’”
Photo courtesy of Dallas ISD.
The accessibility of the sport is part of what led Fortson to give so much to the program. Another reason is his care for the community.
“I was kind of a community person before I started working at Kimball, just always trying to help somebody and not getting paid, not looking for nothing, just trying to help somebody out,” he said.
There are several folks that have also helped Fortson along the way, like the way he has helped others. He said Skyline High School wrestling program’s Larry Karl supported him in accessing gear and Henry Harmony stood up for Kimball’s program to get them to regionals.
“They used to have a thing where you vote and raise your hand on a kid as being ready or being ready to be seated in the regionals. So they came up with what you call a matrix,” he said. “And they call me the ‘Father of the Matrix’ because I felt like I was being discredited as a coach because of my kids’ wrestling style, their record and they said Dallas ISD don’t compete with anybody. So we wouldn’t get up. We wouldn’t used to get ranked in regionals.”
Since the incorporation of the matrix, Fortson’s program has grown at the competition level. He led the first girls’ wrestling team to win regionals two years in a row in 2010 and 2011. Kimball’s Destiny Miles also went to individual state championships in 2019 and 2020.
With the team’s success and the new Hall of Honor induction, Fortson said it seems to open things to where others come to him to find out what makes him successful.
“What I’d like to do is pour into other young coaches, or even some veteran coaches, because I always tell people the same that I’m going to keep learning. It’s what I learned after I ‘know it all’ that counts anyway,” he said. “I keep trying to keep that attitude at my age and even with the honors, I’m going to try to climb as high as I can go in anything I do.”
