Personal achievement is just that, personal. One person could be exuberant about the same result of another who is disappointed by it. The real measure is one’s response to it.
This past weekend the Girls wrestling team had its District XI championships. The tournament is comprised of 9th to 12th grade varsity wrestlers, one per weight class (13 total) per school. The top three in each weight class advance to the regional tournament, which is followed by the State Championships.
The sport was sanctioned by the PIAA last season and the girls have a single class made up of schools of all sizes. By comparison, football and basketball have six classes.
We entered 11 wrestlers and five placed in the top 6. The team finished sixth out of 28 schools. As a team these were good accomplishments as we placed roughly half in top 25% and we finished 9th in our conference tournament, which has all the same schools plus new ones.
The tournament is primarily about the individual though. In this regard, we had both positives and shortcomings.
One girl won her weight class and became our program’s first ever District Champion. She won by fall in the finals defeating an opponent who had pinned her the three previous times they wrestled including last year’s final.
It was a goal achieved for her, but not an end all. She wants to qualify for and place at States. Mentally it is a great boost, but she knows the path gets harder with each match.
Another girl had one win last year, worked hard in the off season and put together a winning season this year. She finished with a 6th place medal.
This was a very positive outcome for her, reinforcing that her hard work paid off. Now she has to up the work effort, improve her mat awareness and strategy while honing her technical skills.
A third wrestled up in weight all year and started strong, but ran through a rough patch mid to late season making her question herself and what was happening to her.
Then she had a strong tournament and won her medal match in overtime to place 5th.
Two girls were frehmen this year and it was their first time ever wrestling. They both had very good tournaments.
One won her first match of the season. It was a close, hard fought match, and in the end she won, but did not know it. A teammate yelled, “you won” and she burst into tears of joy.
She was wrestling up two weights, had to eat all week and drink water before weigh-ins to make the minimum. It was another instance of seeing your hard work pay off.
The other girl only won her first match at our conference tournament, and while she didnt place, she wrestled hard and was in some very close matches that didn’t quite go her way.
She got a taste of winning and saw the distance between winning and losing was closing fast.
The last of note for these purposes had wrestled well all year. She had 20 wins on the season and high expectations for the post-season.
The nine seed upset the top seed, and then our girl. Now she had to win out to advance to Regionals.
Her knee was swollen and she didn’t want to go to the trainer out of fear she would be told she couldn’t wrestle. We convinced her to do it, she got ice and switched her knee pad to that side.
It didn’t help. Not to make excuses, because things happen, but she wasn’t the same physically or mentally and finished sixth.
Now the question becomes, how will she respond? I think she will be driven harder due to the disappointment, but we’re talking about a 15 year old kid, so you never know.
I’ve always told my children and my wrestlers, you can put forth your best effort and lose, and you can have a mediocre performance and win. You need to measure how well you competed against how well you could have competed.
This includes physical training and mental preperation. The event is the culmination. It is the assesment to determine what is working and what needs to be changed.
In project management we call this a retrospective. Sadly they are often skipped.
My father was a head coach for 34 years and he preached the Circle of Success. You trained, learned, competed, and if you lost it was a temporary set-back. You reviewed video, broke down sequences and moves. Identified options to consider and understand what not to do and why. Then you repeated the cycle.
Life is a personal journey as success is also individually defined. So know what you are striving to accomplish and build a plan that works toward achieving it.
Resilient Seeker Coaching | Ross Raymond Nunamaker 