Next Generation of Wrestlers?

[busstogate]

On 12/8/2023 at 1:27 PM, Jcjcjc said:

I think wrestlers who were pretty tough tend to hang out with other wrestlers who are pretty tough, so when they think back on their youth, they have memories mainly of wrestlers who were pretty tough. They prune the memories of un-tough people through the years. 

 

The people who weren't pretty tough in wrestling probably aren't posting and reading this board, so they don't come up with a counter argument through personal experience, so the only side our observations is the tough side, while we are cognizant of both tough and untough people around us today because we don't have to have very good memories for that. 

 

Kids in my day were a mixture of tough and un-tough. Some of my teammates worked extremely hard to improve themselves. I had a few teammates who worked extremely hard when I wrestled them which helped me a lot. I'm eternally grateful for these teammates and developing that type of character is the focus of my coaching career. I also had teammates that weren't tough, and I wouldn't spend much time thinking about them if I didn't coach where I encounter their contemporary archetypical counterparts allowing me to remember hundreds of wrestlers from all my years all at once.

 

The best part of coaching is encountering a kid that reminds you of an untough kid in the past, but helping them develop into a kid who reminds you of a badass tough wrestlers you remember from the past. 

 

I vent to my dad every single season about something that annoys me currently with kids, but he always has a story to top me. His 35 years of coaching just have better highs and better lows than my 16 when it comes to positive and negative examples of toughness, work ethic, dedication to overcoming adversity. 

 

I think of a wrestler from the 90s who lost his mother and didn't ever have his dad around on a weekly basis because it opened my eyes to the most important struggles some kids go through, and my dad was an amazing father who allowed me to learn about what it meant to succeed as a person through wrestling. He always gave me opportunities to analyze the actions of the wrestlers on his team from the time I was old enough to analyze until the I graduated and he retired. 

 

I also think of the kids who quit the morning of sectionals a few years after that last kid graduated who I think had very strong homes, and I've been trying to figure out why kids like that don't want to put it on the line. 

Jason, 

This post hits home for me so hard.  I was perhaps one of the not-so-tough kids going through.  The kids in the IKWF club I was in had me by five years on average and I was just finding out that our sport didn't have turnbuckles and ropes when I joined.  What probably kept me in it was the parents of the veteran kids.  They all made sure to see that all teammates got to meets and tourneys by carpooling. I bailed out on our sport a little into high school due to the lures of street fun, yet got the opportunity to break even through teaching and coaching many years later.  Without question, I would not have become a successful adult and citizen if not for this great sport and am grateful I got to pay it forward as best as I could.