This I Believe

I believe in the sport of wrestling. All the aspects of wrestling has made me a better person. I work harder, think faster and I am tougher than I ever would have been without this ancient sport.

The part of wrestling that is most important to me is the work ethic that I have adopted from this sport. To perform well I need to work extremely hard for seven days a week and three hours a day. I feel that this relates to life because in life, to succeed you need to find something that you are good at and work at it to make a living. It is the same concept for wrestling, I find a move that I’m are good at and I practice it a million times until it’s perfect and unstoppable. I have a few others for backup or desperation but mostly I just use my primary takedown. If I didn’t have a reliable move than I wouldn’t be very successful in wrestling. As you can see wrestling is very much related to life in that you need to work for what you want. Wrestling is not a sport where anyone can just start out and automatically be good, I have had to have many years of training and experience to be a competitor. A great wrestler once said, “Once you have wrestled, everything else in life is easy.” This quote still remains very relevant and my coaches are living proof.

Wrestling has also taught me to think on my feet. In a match I cannot think about what I’m going to do next, I just need to do it and react. This is the main reason to why it takes so much practice to be good. This thinking process has helped me greatly with making smart decisions quickly on and off the mat.

The last aspect of my belief in wrestling is the toughness. The practices that I go through are torture, they break me down completely. In any given practice at LT about five guys will throw up out of pure exhaustion and another five because they ate too much before the practice. This kind of conditioning is what gives a wrestler the edge on his opponent. In wrestling I will always make mistakes from time to time, but what separates a good wrestler from a bad one is his ability to bounce back and cover his mistakes. This is totally related to life because there will be many road bumps in life that we hit but our ability to work hard, think fast and most of all our toughness will give us the strength to withstand and overcome any obstacle in life. My coach once said to me, “No matter how much better the other kid is than you, you can beat anyone if you can last longer than them.”

Wrestling has played a big part in my life and if I could start all over I would never pick a different sport. It has helped me to be a better, and more well-rounded person and how to work my way through problems. I believe in wrestling.