Wrestling is a sport of discipline. With its constant weight-cutting, several-hour long practices, and all day tournaments, wrestling is sport that requires perseverance, patience, and practice. While the three P’s encompass some of the values that are taught for training, there is still so much more to wrestling than that. Wrestlers themselves, are willing to suffer at insane rates day in and day out just for the hopes of getting their hand raised in front of their friends and family at the end of the week, and many of them find that some of the mental skills they are learning in wrestling also helps them in real life.
Being a former wrestler at my high school, I have found this way of thinking to be especially true in my life, as I’ve had to overcome challenges whether I was on the mat or off the mat. I found that the drive/work ethic that wrestling gave me along with the self-discipline, had really helped me get through my first semester in college. While wrestling did take away some study-time and made several of my school days more exhausting to get through, I found that some of the life skills that wrestling taught me during that have really helped prepare me for the challenges I face. I find that a lot of people who don’t participate in wrestling don’t understand how much it can prepare someone for life. Wrestling involves a lot of challenges, and here are some of my reasons how wrestling prepared me for college, and could prepare you for college too if you choose to do it.
For me personally, out of every sport I’ve done, wrestling is the one sport that has taught me the most about this. Ever since I was a little kid, I have played basketball, baseball, lacrosse, football, soccer, hockey, and track and field in competitive leagues, which all have taught me some form of self-discipline in some shape or form. It wasn’t until I joined wrestling however, that I really began to start understanding my strengths and weaknesses as an athlete and as a person. This can be attributed to one of the most basic facts of wrestling, which involves everything you do in wrestling. That one fact is, regardless of how much you surround yourself with your coaches and teammates, is that you are alone and exposed when on the mat. When you go on onto that mat in your wrestling shoes, headgear, and one-piece singlet in front of a crowd of maybe 50 people or so, your choices/actions influence 100% of your success/failure. If you get tossed, pinned, taken down or straight humiliated by your opponent, there is no one that will be there that will take the blame for you or try to comfort you for your inability to succeed.
Your entire physical, mental, and emotional ability is put to the test the second you put your foot on the mat, and everyone will see you for the person you truly are. If you are clumsy, everyone will see it, if you are lazy, everyone will see it, there really is no such thing as “hiding” in wrestling. This type of exposure would really help me during my first semester of college, as I knew my family/parents and peers wanted me to succeed in college. I realized that since my parents aren’t around, my success in college would be determined by every decision I make and nobody would be there to bail me out if I failed. It forced me to start studying more during passing time, work on my time-management skills, and prioritize what my goals were. I started noticing success in the classroom and my job that I got in college when I started doing this, and my grades were solid all throughout the semester. When I failed at something, I immediately started getting help and asking for advice, and I accepted responsibility for my mistakes. I firmly believe that I would not have had this thought process if it wasn’t for the hours I put into wrestling, and self-focused effort I put into being individually responsible.
Fight Through The Pain
One of the main things that drew me to the wrestling, and draws thousands of other people to wrestling, is the fact that anyone who is willing to put in the effort into wrestling can be successful. It doesn’t matter if you’re small, tall, lanky, fat, and skinny or whatever, you can succeed if you are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to win. While I do compete in collegiate track at the University of St. Thomas, I found this advice helpful through my academic work. If I have a tough assignment or I have to finish a paper early the next morning, I find that the mental toughness that wrestling has taught me had given me the ability to succeed in those situations where I might have failed. I also find that being able to deal with more pain has given me the ability to deal with more tasks at once, and it is pretty easy for me to multitask on several things at once.
In college, the ability to get multiple things done at once has allowed me to deal with increasing complex tasks in my environment. Since wrestling takes this concept to the extreme, it makes it much easier for you to deal with more strenuous tasks if you practice wrestling training.
Patience/Determination When Trying To Learn
I think that this skill is one of the most important skills I have learned in school, as I find that I struggle with trying to know everything at once. With all of the information available to us through the internet, press, and people I know in life, I forget that learning in any aspect of life is a progress. If you are taking a challenging math class at your local college and you struggle with math, it might be easy for you to get frustrated if you can master it in a couple days after hours of studying. I find that even when I’ve been studying a subject for weeks/months, there always appears to be some sort of thing that I get wrong. Wrestling taught me that you aren’t going to master any technique in a matter of two practices, and that you have to keep consistently working on all the fundamentals in order to beat your opponent.
My wrestling coach Mr. Fornicoia would always say, “Practice like you would in a match, because if you can’t do it in here (the practice room), you won’t be able to do it out there (The actual match)”. This piece of advice has definitely helped me a ton in college, as it made me realize just how important all of the annoying assignments and notes that you take to prepare for a test. I realized that if you want to do well on a test, you need to first master it in the homework that you do. By doing wrestling, I found that my ability to be patient had improved greatly. This helped me to some extent in wresting, but has definitely helped me in other aspects of my life.
Wrestling is one of the main reasons why I felt I have grown so much as a person through the past three years, and is the main reason I see growth in myself today. My ability to hold a couple jobs, participate in a college band, participate in Division III Track, and take five classes at the same time, to the discipline that wrestling taught me. I strongly encourage anyone who has the opportunity to wrestling should take advantage while they can. I have to admit that wrestling was a crap load of work, and it exhausted me to no end. The work was worth it though, as it helped me become the person I am today.
