Leadership / Competition / Mistakes / Failures / Resilience
Leadership Moment — 3 Feb 24
Shake it off!
I didn’t wrestle in high school. I was a football / basketball / track guy. I can vividly remember coming off the basketball court after practice one day talking to a teammate about what a tough practice it had been. Then I looked up and saw the wrestling team moving towards the locker room. Those guys looked exhausted. I mean worn out, wrung-dry, and barely moving. I shut up.
At West Point, wrestling was a required phys ed class and I really liked it. I ended up wrestling intramurals three years but that was nothing compared to high school wrestling.
My two sons both wrestle now and we had a match last night. They each had three matches. One of them went 1–2 and the other was 0–3. It got me to thinking about wrestling compared to other sports and confirmed something I’d already learned.
Wrestling makes you both physically and mentally tougher. I would argue to a much greater extent than any other high school sport. Football? I love football and with the dynamic collisions it could be argued to be a more violent sport but I challenge you to defend it as tougher. Watch a kid go three periods of grinding individual combat on the mat and then let’s talk.
