First Weeks of Practice Summary

Now that our 24 week season has started Coach Northcott and I can start coaching the wrestlers and leading practice. Many of our wrestlers have had very good coaching in their high school programs. However, there is still room for improvement. I’m sure most of our wrestler’s former coaches would agree. Sloppy technique that worked at the high school level isn’t going to work at the college level if it isn’t sharpened. Part of the sharpening process depends on who critiques the wrestlers, who does the wrestler have to practice with, and what effort the wrestler puts into “perfecting” what he already knows. We have the luxury of having wrestlers in our room from all over the Midwest, one from Texas and two others from South Carolina. Our wrestlers all bring their own styles into our room which is good for the health of our room. Each of our wrestlers learns from each other as well as from their coaches. I’ve been encouraged to see some of our wrestlers teaching each other some technique that they like in order to help advance their teammates chances for success on the mat. It is interesting to watch some of our wrestlers as they get frustrated trying technique that they used all the time in high school and seeing that it is not working in our wrestling room. If it is not working in our room, it probably isn’t going to be affective when it comes to competition outside of the room. So we have been working on getting back to the basics and refining the technique and body positions that the wrestlers already know about but still need to work on. We have introduced some technique that may be new to some of the wrestlers, but that has not been our emphasis. Along with sharpening technique we have been working to develop a mental and physical toughness through live goes and extra conditioning at the end of practice. If you polled our wrestlers I don’t think you would find a single wrestler who thinks that our practices have been too easy. We have been picking it up, but we need to pick it up a little more. Towards the middle of the week this week we saw a little let down in the level of intensity and hopefully we see the intensity pick up today at practice. Over the last week we have seen a few minor injuries, but not anything the wrestlers shouldn’t bounce back from. We have had a few wrestlers state that they felt we were going to hard and that they were sore. I can understand why. We have been going hard and maybe harder than some of them have ever gone. Coach Northcott reminded the wrestlers yesterday that it takes about 14 days for wrestlers to get into wrestling shape. By next week we should be close to our wrestling shape and looking to improve every day after that. Our first competition will be at Lindenwood University and is only 20 days away. Lindenwood University is a very tough first tournament of the season which will introduce many of our wrestlers to how challenging college wrestling really can be. The date for the LU tournament is October 30th and is an unusual one as we will be wrestling the tournament on a Friday instead of a Saturday. I hope many of our fans in the St. Louis area can make it.