Nitpicking and grinning
When it comes to covering high school sports, stories tend to get repetitious.
Every August there is typically a heatwave and there is always a story on how football coaches are keeping their players from overheating. After the tipoff of last Tuesday’s Lady Cubs’ game against Newcastle I knew it was winter sports season, but a story I’ve always wrote is no long available.
About now would be the time I wrote a story on wrestlers shedding pounds in order to compete in the most ideal weight class. It’s always a great story because of how technical cutting weight is and how dangerous it can be. Imagine spending all summer bulking up for football, then having to lose all of that weight in just a few weeks. This story may sound foriegn down here, but where I’m from it’s just another bread-and-butter write-up.
I almost gasped when I heard Olney High School did not have a wrestling team.
Why not have a wrestling team? It costs next to nothing; it’s one of the safest high school sports and it builds character in a way no other sport can match.
Maybe the shock came because wrestling has been a part of my life since I was in elementary school. Contrary to popular belief, Kansas is not the birthplace of basketball. However, it is where basketball was refined into what it is today. Growing up in the wheat state meant every kid participated in a youth basketball league, except for those weird wrestling kids.
Eventually I found myself inside the notoriously steaming hot wrestling room at Blue Valley High School. The first few practices, I got throttled. The longer the season went on, the better I got and learned a few life lessons along the way. In wrestling, there is no teammate to blame for a loss; practice as well as maintaining or cutting weight requires a wrestler to take greater responsibility; and the benefits of wrestling are only matched by the investment of time and energy.
Journalism requires mental toughness. It requires accepting criticism; it requires accepting and correcting mistakes and it requires putting the ego aside in order to maintain an objective view point. Believe it or not, many of these same lessons can also be learned in wrestling. Maybe it stings because I developed mental toughness that kept me in journalism while long before I joined my first newspaper. I developed it on a wrestling mat.