Wrestling is without a doubt one of the hardest sports I have ever participated in, and i’m glad I did. I was at the beginning not very good, but my coach toughened me up a lot and that really helped me. Not just in wrestling, but in who I am.

Ever since I started wrestling, I’ve gotten stronger, tougher, bigger, and meaner on the mat, and nicer to everyone off the mat. I originally, wouldn’t have ever even dreamed about doing wrestling, mainly because i’m lazy, but I kept hearing how much the coach wanted me to do it, and then I heard it would help me in football, so I joined. At first it wasn’t so bad, but then it got worse really quick. I have never been in that much pain, I have never bled that much, and I certainly have never felt the deep gut-wrenching feeling of loss so often. Sure, in football you were sad when you lost, but it wasn’t just me. I was completely alone, everyone was watching me when I wrestled, and I kept loosing. The worst thing was, I never told myself that I needed to get better.
When I finally convinced myself I wanted to get better, it was near the end of football season, i’m a high school freshman, and I played varsity football on a team full of juniors and seniors. It wasn’t easy, but when I was replaced on varsity for the last game of the year I felt miserable. I decided then, that the only way to get better was to push myself, so when my second wrestling season started up, thats exactly what I did. Now i’m starting my second year on varsity with a okay record so far, which is really good for me coming out of a pretty bad win to loss ratio on JV to a decent start on varsity.
Being the new varsity wrestler, everyone expects me to do great, which I will, just not this year. because it’s my first year on varsity with no experience coming in to this year, I still have plenty of time to train and get better. Sometimes people don’t understand how physically demanding wrestling can be. Wrestling will drain a person’s energy very quickly if they weren’t conditioned, and that a lot of what we do.
So if a person ever thinks wrestling looks easy, or “homosexual” as some say, let them come to a practice sometime and see what they think after. It really sucks, especially when I am not “on track” with my weight, and have to cut and not eat as much before a weigh-in. Wrestling is hard. Much harder than most other sports on the planet. Wrestling taught me discipline, toughness and many other things, like managing my weight, which is very helpful as a heavyweight.