I walk into my house and throw my stuff down as I walk upstairs to go to bed. My legs tremble with every step because they are too tired to support my bodyweight. When I lay down I want to go to sleep and not have to get up for the rest of the night. This is an average day getting home from wrestling practice. On some days the coach is in a particularly bad mood and it is worse. Why I decided to do wrestling I will never know. But all I know is that going into freshman year my dad had been pressuring me into doing it. Up until that point I had only played baseball and football. I knew I was going to be quitting baseball because I no longer wanted to play the game. I had to find another sport to play because my parents wanted me to play at least two sports in high school. They had this rule with my brother too and I think it was because they wanted us to have something to fill our time after school. I had a bunch of different sports in mind and I was unsure about which one to play. Wrestling, basketball, maybe stick with baseball. I had no idea what I was going to do. My dad really wanted me to do wrestling but I had never done anything like it and was not sure if I would like it. He told me one day that I can just do one year and if I don’t like it then I can find a different sport the next year. What I didn’t realize at the time is that I would not be able to quit and that I was in it for the duration of my high school career. No matter how much I hated it or how much I begged for them to let me quit.
I would end up not minding it for the most part freshman year. The practices were only technique work most of the time because most of us were new and the conditioning was pretty easy. We would run a little bit and then wrestle for a while. I actually thought that it was kind of fun and that I wouldn’t mind it. Another detail about freshman year was that we were in the freshman room that was separate from the varsity room. I had never been in the varsity room before and didn’t know what it was like. After freshman year I was pretty sure that I was going to stick with wrestling and that I would end up liking the sport. Soon after the school year ended I started doing offseason wrestling to prepare for the year ahead. My first day of offseason was with a coach from a different school. He was a very nice guy and didn’t seem to be too crazy like I had been told all varsity wrestling coaches are. The whole first week was with the same guy and it went great. The second week was the biggest wakeup call ever. We had the assistant coach from Maine South and he had us do the most tiring work out I had ever done. I went home rethinking every decision I had ever made about wrestling. When the rest of the week was just as hard I wanted out. I went to my dad and told him I was not going to do wrestling. I thought I had a good argument but after telling the whole thing to my dad about how it was too hard and I could do better in different sports he was not listening to a single word. He was dead set on me doing wrestling all four years. I immediately knew that this was his plan the whole time. He would trick me into one year of wrestling and make me do the rest. Going in to sophomore year, the decision to just accept the fact that I was going to do wrestling the rest of high school was one of the hardest things I had done up to that point. I knew that I was agreeing to have long days and longer weekends and have practices and tournaments on holidays and over breaks and every single weekend would be an 8 hour tournament but I had no choice but to accept it and try to make the best out of what I had. Looking back today I realize that it was a great decision to do it and that I am a better athlete for it.
Sophomore year going into the first day of practice was like walking into a funeral. Complete silence. A depressing cloud hung over the room. Everybody had a certain look on their face that seemed to acknowledge that the next three months was going to be miserable. If I hadn’t already been upset about being forced to do wrestling already, the atmosphere of the room was enough to push me over the edge. However, I did realize that I wasn’t alone and there were quite a few kids who would rather be somewhere other than here. For the rest of the year I was the backup on JV. There was no sophomore team and almost all of the sophomores sat out the whole time because the juniors had taken the JV spot. I eventually realized that I had to do all the work and not get to compete. It was a depressing thought but I also realized that when I was a junior or a senior I would get to be in the spotlight. I would get to show everybody, even my dad, what I had learned from joining the wrestling team.

Looking back to the end of my freshman year I realize that if I hadn’t made the decision to do wrestling I would have been a completely different person. I would have not been as good of a football player; I would not have learned how to push myself beyond what I thought I could do. Yes it is an extremely hard sport, and you need to put in a lot if you want to get a lot back, but it is also one of the best sports a high school student can play. I thank my dad for making me do the sport because it made me a better person today.