Wrestling - The Parents Worst Fear
and catch on fairly quickly. Others come in not knowing what they are getting themselves in to. They come in with enthusiasm and ambition but with little or no experience. For either type becoming a member of the ARHS wrestling team is not an easy process. The first week of practice is hard for everyone, but especially new wrestlers. They know if they want a varsity spot for the first match, they have to work extremely hard. Before the first match, each wrestler is weighed. If there is more than one wrestler in a weight class, they will have a wrestle-off, where two people wrestle and whoever wins gets the varsity spot.
Watching the ARHS wrestling team communicate now is much like watching a pride of lions on the Discovery Channel. They are very playful with each other and they take very good care of each other. The littlest one who weighs only 103 pounds will run up and attack the biggest one who is twice his size and then some. The bigger one will accept the challenge but he is very aware of the little one’s limits. On bus rides and at daylong tournaments they laugh and joke at one another’s expense. Sometimes they pool their pocket change together and pay each other to do rather idiotic things. After the Western Mass. Tournament one year when we went to a Chinese buffet, they paid a sophomore six dollars to drink whatever they put into his glass. How he kept it all down I shall never know.
Among all the difficult tasks one has to perform when on a wrestling, maintaining his weight is probably one of the hardest. Wrestling season starts they day the students get back from Thanksgiving break. This means that the wrestlers should not stuff themselves at their holiday feasts because that would only make the first practice harder and get them farther away from their target weight (unless their target weight is more than they already weigh). Fortunately, the wrestling team is like Jenny Craig. One watches what he eats and exercises with a group. In a day, a wrestler might eat a piece of fruit for breakfast, skip lunch or have a few crackers and a bottle of Gatorade or PowerAde, and maybe have a bagel, a salad, or a Powerbar for dinner. If he is under weight, then he can have a sandwich or something that resembles an actual meal for a teenaged boy.
To keep their minds off of food and focused on wrestling, they often talk to each other wrestlers from other teams. They talk right through a match from handshake to handshake. If there is a flaw in the opponent’s stance, technique or overall match, it gets picked up on very quickly. Such analyses are critical at tournaments by the captains. There are only two coaches so they rely on the captains and more experienced wrestlers to show other [next page]