Injuries Report and 5 mile run improvement

Last Wednesday afternoon I was looking forward to attending the first evening service of “Three Days in September” which is an annual event here at HLG before I realized God had other plans for me that evening. To make a long story short I ended up spending the evening in the emergency room. Thankfully, it wasn’t me that needed to see the doctors this time! I had two wrestlers injured in one practice. One had to get x-rays of his ankle and the other received probably about 50-75 stitches to reattach part of his ear to his head. It sounds gruesome and when you see the picture you will say that it looks gruesome. Thankfully this wrestler was able to return to conditioning today and will get his stitches out sometime this week. One might assume that he should have been wearing headgear while he was wrestling, but his injury did not occur as a result of a hard go. His injury was a result of playing a cat and mouse type game towards the end of the open mat time. He caught a knee to the side of his head which included part of his ear. In all my years of coaching this was the worse cut that I have seen happen during the wrestling practice.
The highlight of last week was seeing all the wrestlers, with the exception of one, improve their Five Mile time. 3 of the top five improved their placing in their top five finishes. Finishing in 1st place Kasey Cates, up from 3rd place and finishing in 2nd place Daniel Yuraitis, up from 4th place and finishing in 3rd place Ryan Stark, up from 6th place and finishing 4th Shane LeGrand, and finishing at 5th place Jobi Hambrick. On Saturday, we wrapped up the week with 1 mile hard runs 3 times with line drills and weight check after practice. We set the goal of having everyone within 10 lbs of their wrestling weight on Saturday by the end of practice. We only had one wrestler who was .1 over his target weight. The new wrestling weigh in procedures instituted by the NCAA this year require that wrestlers weigh in wearing at least underwear. So Dad’s, the memory of the old tradition of stepping on the scale and being a .1 over and dropping your drawers to make weight has come to an end. I wonder if a new tradition will start with wrestlers taking scales to the store to find out which underwear brand makes the lightest underwear.