Growing up as a wrestler you always heard about the lessons and values wrestling would teach you for life. Anyone who has spent any time in the sport can attest to this. You will certainly learn a ton of things, but at a certain point too much focus on the lessons and progress and you’ll lose sight of the truth; it’s just a game!
In this post I will prove and explain why any athlete, parent, or coach needs to understand why wrestling needs to be treated less like math class and more like gym class!
If you’ve read any of my posts before you’d know that I wrestled at Penn State. I am grateful for my time there and the many lessons I learned but now as a coach myself it is always impressive how my old coaches continue to teach an old dog new tricks. Cael Sanderson has forgotten more wrestling than I’ll ever learn, even with all the resources nowadays. But perhaps what separates Coach Cael from so many has always been his attitude to the sport. You don’t become the greatest wrestler in College history and arguably the greatest coach in college history by accident.
In his NCAA Press Conference in 2023 Coach Cael gave one of his most influential but possibly overlooked bits of wisdom. I am gonna let him speak for himself:
I have heard a ton of little speeches from Coach Cael. He has a purpose in everything he says and when he lets you know what he thinks, you listen. He is right on target with this quote but I am using it more as an anecdote for a further explanation of what he said this year after nationals. For context, Penn State had crowned four champs, including TWO four time champs, two more finalists, and two other All-Americans. They set the record for team points and beat the second place team by 100 points. It was the ultimate display of dominance, but one of the questions Coach Cael was asked was to elaborate and explain how he adopted the mindset from above.
He was asked how he developed that mindset, this was his answer:
It’s always been a game. That’s just the way I was raised. You want to win every game we play. If it’s at home, you’re playing video games or you’re playing whatever you’re playing, you’re trying to win.And it is a game. I mean, all you have to do is look back 20 years and who can tell us (who won and who lost ) but it doesn’t matter. Life moves forward and this is just all about preparation and getting ready for the next stage in life.
And with that perspective, you can compete a little bit more freely. It’s just the truth. You don’t have to look hard to realize that sports aren’t that important.We love them and they give us purpose. We learn a lot of really valuable things out of them, but first and foremost is character.And you have kids that don’t reach their goals in wrestling and sometimes that can be the best thing for them in their life. You just never know. It’s up to them and what they decide to do with the next stage.Or you can have somebody that wins and they want to ride that wave. And that wave, it fades quickly and you’ve got to move on to the next thing. It’s just a game, but it’s fun to win when you play games.“
What I perhaps love the most from this quote, and I have listened to this press conference probably thirty times at this point, is that Coach Cael lets everyone know that wrestling is not the end-all-be-all so many people are told it is. There is much more to life than just wrestling, and I think that as sports have moved towards such a degree of specialization, professionalism, and have become borderline job like, we need to focus on what sports truly are, just a game!
Finding the Balance: Games as Lessons; Play for the Love of the Game!
For those who aren’t nerds like me and don’t read/listen to books and podcasts regularly you might not know, nor care who Aristotle was. He was a Greek philosopher who set the foundation for much of our modern thinking. But one thing he did a really good job of breaking down was virtues and the importance of balance in regard to them.
“Virtue is the mean of two extremes” What this means is that you need to find balance between the extremes to find true virtue. An example is courage. If you completely disregard your own safety that is not courage, that is being reckless. If you don’t want to do anything because of fear, well that’s obviously not courage. Courage is right in the middle where you understand the dangers but push forward anyway.
Wrestling can be a metaphor for life, but so can any sport, or any game for that matter. Many of the lessons parents, coaches and athletes look to find in wrestling can be found in almost any game you play. That is why it is important to understand that part of doing a sport is treating it like a game and loving the game, not the outcomes.
In dodgeball, if you get hit than you understand you’re down/out, depending on the rules you might need to count on your teammates to get you back in, or you might have to wait for the next game. Either way, you will learn patience, resilience from withstanding the hits, body awareness from dodging, among many other lessons.
This was a dumb example but it illustrates my point that any game can serve to teach lessons if you are looking for them, but most aren’t playing dodgeball to learn to be patient, they are playing because it’s fun and they like the game!
We have placed a heavy focus in our society on using sports as methods to teach lessons and build athletes as people, while I believe this is important I also believe we need to focus more on allowing athletes to make the sport their own, to love the game and not the results, to love playing and not looking for lessons in all they do.
Stop Making Wrestling a Job; “If you love something you’ll never work a day in your life”
Perhaps my biggest gripe as a coach is seeing athletes of all ages forced into specialization in any sport. I don’t generally push for wrestlers to focus only on wrestling. Yet it seems like there is an entire industry building off of forcing teenagers to pick one sport for the rest of their athletic career. You have private coaches, home schooling academies focused almost entirely on a sport, private strength trainers, sports psychologists and much more.
While I am by no means saying I hate any of these things, I believe they all can certainly serve a purpose, I find it crazy that you see people utilizing these things with athletes as young as eight years old. An eight year old doesn’t need to be homeschooled working out three times a day. This issue is not exclusive to wrestling, it might not even be as big in wrestling as it is in other sports.
Athletes used to be able to play sports in their school and have a huge team, now there are schools that can’t even field a full wrestling team. There are wrestlers who quit before they’ve even given wrestling a true chance because they run into a Career Wrestler.
Little Jimmy ties up his shoes for the first time and goes to wrestle a tourney where little Johnny the eight year old who’s been doing private lessons three times a week since he was four and Johnny destroys Jimmy and makes Jimmy realize he doesn’t want to play this game anymore.
I am not the coach who believes that everyone should get a medal for trying, but I also believe that almost every sport has become infected with results oriented coaches and parents forcing athletes to essentially make a sport their job for their entire life. While I do believe that there can and maybe should come an age where you put all your eggs in a basket I think so many are making that choice before an athlete even knows what they like. I can’t tell you how many athletes I see every year that are so good at what they do, but DESPISE doing it. It’s like that coworker we all know who is incredibly good at what they do but knows that they are working for a paycheck and not doing what they love.
“Kids love athletes because they followed their dreams” This quote is from a scene in the movie Up in the Air where George Clooney is firing an employee, the scene is about how the character gave up on their dreams for the sake of a career instead. (Full Scene warning: graphic languageUp in the Air (3/9) Movie CLIP – How Much Did They Pay You to Give Up on Your Dreams? )
“They clock in, they clock out and they never have a moment of happiness.” Another quote from that scene that I think has become so apparent in athletics and something that I am grateful I don’t see often as a coach. Athletes who have been pushed into the sport or forced to focus on just wrestling who have become the guys who just get dropped off and do their time. I want each and every athlete I coach to love this sport, to have a great time in their career and whenever that ends, to be able to look back on it with a smile.
There is a famous saying; “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Now maybe athletes who start specializing at six do love wrestling a ton and they are dragging their parents to practices and tournaments, but this is more often the exception, not the rule. I believe more often than not we are training our athletes to prioritize the wrong things, to love the wrong things, and overall we are telling them that they will learn all these valuable lessons while they may begin to do the total opposite. This brings me to my most important and final point.
Let the Athletes Decide: What to learn, What to Prioritize, and How to Do It!
Humans are taught and bread to be negative at first. It takes a lot of work to override negative thinking and look for the positive. This is true of almost anything in life, when you first start driving you are terrified of what may happen, then you become confident in your abilities and learn to find your own style of driving. In sports we don’t often see the athletes being the ones in the driver’s seat. As a coach I get that there is a time to lead and time to be led, but many athletes are never given that chance.
If you tell an athlete not to do something, their brain is pre-wired to almost do the exact opposite. A baseball coach tells a batter to watch out for a certain pitch, now the batter is focused more on looking out for that pitch than their own process. A wrestling coach tells the wrestler the opponent has a great takedown, so instead of hunting their own they are working to negate the other athlete. We think in the negative, and we can’t beat negative with negative, you have to replace the thought entirely!
This begins early in an athletes career, you need to let the athlete decide more and more and you will see their trust in their own gut take over and begin to ignite their drive for the sport. Don’t tell them how to learn, don’t tell them what they should be doing, let them learn to prioritize for themselves and discover their own methods.
If you truly want wrestling to be a metaphor for life for your athlete than let them discover early and often that they are responsible for their career and their lives, put the power in their hands and safeguard them as they evolve into the person they ought to become, not the person you want them to be.
I understand as a coach or parent it is difficult because we have a vision for what we want an athlete to become, we want to make sure they become a good wrestler, good person, good student etc. but what we don’t understand more often than not is that that is not in our control, and it is not what wrestling is meant to do.
Life is a flowing river of decisions and consequences for all of us. We need to understand that the choices we make for ourselves, and for others, will yield an outcome. That outcome isn’t always what we want but sometimes it’s what we need, and vice versa. I have been privileged to learn from some of the best in the world, to have been alongside NCAA Champs, World Champs, and Olympic Champs, but a wrestler can not get to that point if they don’t survive the journey.
This brings me to my final point and perhaps the hardest lesson of all for wrestling coaches, parents and athletes. Sometimes wrestling will hurt; sometimes it will crush you. Sometimes your heroes aren’t who you thought they were, sometimes your friends aren’t really your friends, among many other painful lessons. These are the hardest to see an athlete go through, or to go through yourself.
But this is also why we must allow athletes to understand that this sport is just a game. Life is going to be painful, that is certain. But sports do not have to be a part of that pain in their entirety. They can be an outlet for pain, a source of inspiration but most of all they must be left to their one and true purpose, to be something you do because it is fun.
If you made it this far, thank you so much. I spend a lot of time planning these posts out and I am grateful to all who support and inspire me. If you enjoyed this post please consider sharing it with others to spread the message. You can also check out other posts I have written previously on our blog page Centurion Mindset – Build the Mental Game
If you have any questions or want to talk more about it please reach out, my email is Centurionwrestlingnj@gmail.com I am happy to talk more about any topic!
