Varsity Wrestling Weekend

Friday, I traveled with most of the varsity team to a 15 team duals tournament in the mountains. Coach P and I were in charge. We brought our starters in 11 weight classes, two managers, and a group of five backups. Coach Z and Coach T took our top two wrestlers to a high-level competition in Delaware. 

I took a shot of the school as we approached.

It was a very new building. Looked very nice.

The gym was pristine. They fit five wrestling mats. That's great for a school that has less than half the population of mine. 

Our wrestlers promptly did what wrestlers do: sprawl out on the mats. That hasn't changed since I was in their shoes.

There have been lots of other things that have changed since I wrestled. The weight classes, the starting weights,....and the mats.

I used to wrestle on PVC Resilite mats. They thick, heavy, and a pain to roll up. Three strips made one regulation mat. The new Dollamur mats take six strips to build a regulation mat and are much easier to roll up and move around. You use more tape with the extra sections, but they are lighter and segmented to roll up and store.

There were a pair of "old school" mats at the tournament, though. One was normal, but the other...

The other was weird. It was like quicksand. If you stood in one place you slowly sunk in. The school's coach saw me snapping a pic and stopped to chat. He told me that if I were to sit on my knees I'd feel the floor after a minute.

I did. Not a fan.

I dubbed it a "tempurpedic" wrestling mat. It certainly didn't help any of our wrestlers get off their backs.

The other big change is the scoreboards. It's all done online now. The results are uploaded in realtime. Anyone can go to trackwrestling.com and check results as they come in. Pretty cool!

As a team, we spent the first day getting crushed. It was not pretty. Coach P alternated between angry and depressed.

Wrestling talk
Day 1:

Our lineup was pretty week. We had to forfeit two weight classes and we had inexperienced JV wrestlers as our starters at two others. The weights on our team are skewed very low, so we don't have any depth at the upper levels. Our 152 pounder is a first year wrestler. Three of our best wrestlers are all 120 lbs. Our back-up would easily be varsity on another team, but you can't wrestle more than one kid per class. Our heavyweight JUST ended his football season last week and hasn't started practicing yet. To top it all off, our state champion and our other state finisher were hundreds of miles away at a different tournament.

It made for a pretty brutal spectacle at times. The majority of our guys ended up in pins and had people hanging on to their wrists all day. We ended up in many two on ones. We were tilted left and right, and three of the four day 1 teams threw in boots and "rode us like ponies" (Coach P). We looked okay on our feet. It went to hell in a handbag any time it went elsewhere. Coach Z focuses heavily on the neutral position to the exclusion of others. He does drill baby and power stand-ups, but the focus is (again) getting up to neutral and shooting. No throws.

There were a few bright spots. The guys who have been with the system did well. Our 120 and our captain at 132 in particular. They fought some very tough matches and came out ahead. Our 129 beat the 7th place finisher in the State last year.

We ended the day 0-4.

We didn't return back to our school until 10:40 PM. Once all the wrestlers were picked up, I started my drive home. I would have made it by 11:05 if not for the sobriety checkpoint.

I made it to bed around 11:30 PM. Shane woke up at 12:00 AM. He had a nightmare about a stolen shopping cart.

Day 2:

Day 2 started bright and early. We boarded the bus around 7:30 AM to make weigh-ins.

Only our captain didn't pass. He was .2 over. We lost our best wrestler before any matches began. None of our backups were in his weight class, either.

Another team had a kid scratch at .2 over and threw a hissy fit. They actually left the tournament.* It screwed up the brackets and we ended up in a round-robin format against teams we'd already faced.

Coach P and I talked. We knew we were boned before we started, so we prioritized experience. We brought in a backup at 120, bumped our 120 to 126, and bumped out 126 to 132. We had a backup 138, so we brought him in at 138 and bumped or 138 to 145. Even though we faced two of the same teams, it allowed a group of our guys to get on the mat or to face someone new. Our standard 145 didn't mind sitting out, because he had a sore elbow from the day before.

Our decision was vindicated in the first dual. Our backup 120 lost in overtime to a state place winner. Our newly minted 126 gained a hard fought win over a wrestler who had beat our normal 126, and then our usual 126 got a pin an emotional win with a pin at 132. Coach P and I were out of our seats and hugging. We'd been afraid we were about to throw him to the wolves.

During the first dual on Friday, our normal 126 was pounded on. His opponent made it look like he was teaching a ball and chain clinic. We didn't know until later that his opponent had been a 4A state champion. Our 126 came off the mat crying. It was great for him to make a statement to start off day two.

After that, we put in a freshman at 138 who did well even as he lost 8-4. He has some prior experience and tried to do some rolls (like the Peterson). Honestly, he's a more well-rounded wrestler than our current 138. He tried to wrestle off, but got caught in a weird move. He's got a great chance to earn a spot by the end of the year over our current 138 (provided no one else beats him to it).

The rest of the followed a similar path. Our rotation gained us some wins and some good experience. Our captain's screw up (which will probably bring down fire and brimstone from Coach Z on our first day back in practice) allowed for our backups to get on the mat and get some success.

We even managed to win a dual. We lost our two repeat bouts, but the third team was a small school. The wrestlers they had were very good, but there were more blanks in their roster than ours. It was not without drama, though. One of their wrestlers walked over and said something snide after kicking our 160's ass. Coach P told the other team's coach and the guy got ready to throw down. The dual wasn't decided until the final seconds of the last week class, either.

We packed up and headed out on the high note while we had it.

Anyway, that's the not quick but not exhaustive report. It was an exhausting, but good experience. If you want to know more you'll have to ask me in person. I managed to rip a hole in my khaki's day one working with a kid on stand-ups. I told him he owed me a knew pair of pants if he couldn't get an escape afterward. And then there was....