f you tuned in last week, you will know how I ended up going to my first wrestling practice. If you missed last week, you can check it out here. https://www.myhousesportsgear.com/blog/how_i_got_into_wrestling/
To prepare for wrestling practice, my mom took me to Scheels to get some wrestling shoes. Actually, still to this day, I have my Nike Speedsweeps that I wore to my first practice. I can fondly remember sitting in my room trying on my shoes, unable to contain my excitement for my wrestling practice the next day.
The following day, I couldn’t sit still in school waiting for 6:30 to roll around that night. The practice was held at the high school, and when I got there high school practice was still going on, so I waited outside in the hallway with my fellow elementary wrestlers. Finally, it was time for practice to start; we started by running and I slowly started to realize that I was the only girl there. All of these thoughts soon washed away when we started “playing” Fox and the Hound. I put playing in quotes because our coaches called it a game, but we thought it was terrible. In order to play the game, you first need to decide who the hound is, and then the rest of the players are foxes. The foxes start on one side of the room and the hound on the other. The game is only over when one fox passes the hound or when the hound passes all of the foxes. As you can imagine, this game took forever and required you to sprint for a long period of time. I know that this game may sound terrible, I distinctly remember pushing myself so hard that I puked afterward on multiple occasions, but it is one of the things that made me buy into this sport. I had never had to push myself so hard, and for so long, in any other sport. This made wrestling stand out for me. After we were all exhausted from fox and the hound, it was time to stretch and start technique. Before we started the technique portion of the practice, we were split into three groups by skill level. I was, of course, put in the first group for beginners. However, my friends that were my age were all in the most experienced group. This lit a fire inside me that I still have at the age of 21. I eventually did make it to the experienced group, but not without a ton of hard work and proving people wrong.
Stick around for next week’s blog where I talk about the controversy I overcame as a junior high female wrestler.