The Slope Wrestling Club

Hey everybody,

Hopefully more people are finding the site after the posters my awesome wife designed got hung in the schools and around town. I hope you like them.

I am going to go against my blogging rule for this post. The idea of me creating the blog is to try to force me to give short bursts of info. So many times when I get excited about something, I tend to ramble and write tomes of information. So, my rule is that in the blog, I must keep my posts short because people aren't going to read it if it is long-winded and takes forever to get through. I am going to break my rule for this post. Sorry! But please stay tuned and read through this as it is really important stuff and going to be some of the most ambitious big time ideas I have.

So, I've created a USA Wrestling Club to parallel my work with Cedaredge High School and the Cedaredge Wrestling Program. After reading some posts on www.cowrestling.com regarding wrestling on the Western Slope, especially those by Gwen Lane, I got to thinking. I was always planning on creating a USA Wrestling Club, just my focus is a little greater now. I would like the club to "provide challenges and opportunities for athletes on the Western Slope to seek the next level in their wrestling performance."

A lot of the purpose here is to renew the wrestling slogan that Iron Sharpens Iron. There are a few major aims of the club:
1) provide open and available facilities where athletes can get the training partners and competition they need
2) coordinate transportation to tournaments and camps to get exposure to the best competition and training in the state and country
3) provide scholarship opportunities for activities for those athletes with the will but not the resources

When I read about the Lane's commitment to helping their boys, I thought a lot about my own parents. I really would like to dedicate this club to them to try to replicate the support they gave me and my brothers. With my mother's illness, I really gave a lot of thought to what my parents have all done for me to help me be successful in school and wrestling. They didn't help us out by being the 24/7 intense parent coach seen at many youth tournaments--heck, after all the matches they've watched and all the listening they did and all the trips to Northern Plains, neither of them could even explain a basic move. They did help us though by sensing if we were nervous and telling us that the other guys sh*t stunk just like ours and if you get nervous just say 3 Glory Be's before the match.

The overall conclusion that I came up with about my success was that my parents were especially good at satisfying my basic needs so that I could focus on doing my best and making my best better. For the life of me, I cannot recall a time going to school worried about something. I cannot think of a time when I brought the baggage or issues that I see many of my own students showing up with each day. Again, my needs were met.

And I'm not talking just about food and shelter. I'm talking about safety needs--feeling secure about my health, money, and that if something were to go wrong, I have a safety net and support group to help me out. I'm also talking about love needs and a sense of belonging. Being accepted at home unconditionally and knowing there was a safety net allowed me the confidence to seek out who I wanted to be and who I still want to become.

So the idea of the club is to help give kids the resources and support they need to become the people they want to be. I want to emulate my parents and help satisfy some basic needs and use wrestling as the engine for this purpose.

So, to leave the philosophical realm and get back to the real world, here are some concrete thoughts:

• Initially, I want this club set up for liability insurance and so kids within the district have a place to wrestle with eachother during freestyle, greco, and the off-season as well as bring in world-class clinicians during our weeklong fall, winter, and spring breaks. Although we are competitors, I would like to live the spirit of our superintendant that we are a school district instead of a district of schools. Again, Iron Sharpens Iron. This will ultimately help Delta County Schools and the western slope represent when it comes to state and national competition.
• When I have the cash to upgrade my '92 Nissan pickup, I want a Dodge Sprinter for hauling dogs and kids. I plan on spending time each summer in the midwest with family. I would like to raise money for local scholarships to J Robinson's camps. Then my wife and I can transport those kids to Minneapolis when I visit my brother there. When they are at camp, I can visit Wisconsin and Illinois for a month and then pick the athletes up from camp and come back to Colorado.
• I also want to take kids that have come through our program to Mongolia. Wrestling is the national sport there and my wife's sister is a missionary in the capital city as well as a freelance travel agent. My wife and I want to visit our Godson and neice and take wrestlers to help out with the homeless children summer camp that my sister-in-law runs for a month. Our kids could help out by teaching "American" wrestling. We would also be able to explore the countryside in one of the most unspoiled countries in the world. To cap things off, we would go to the Nadaam Festival where the country comes together to celebrate the three manly games: horsemanship, archery, and WRESTLING!
• This last point is something that is for the long haul. Eventually, I would like to see the club fundraise to the point where our scholarships could come from the interest from an endowment. Schools do this with their scholarship funds for graduating seniors (I just gave a speech at my highschool's scholarship dinner where they had a silent auction and live music), and the Catholic school that I work for now works a lot the same way for teacher salaries. Fundraising for travel is important. One of my best friends, who was an All American in college with me, runs a wrestling club in Juneau, AK. The only way in or out of Juneau is by boat or plane so if they are going to compete they need money. He is really successful and he brings in top TOP clinicians every summer for his camps and his wrestlers compete in Reno every year. He runs the club as a nonprofit and is a government lobbyist primarily for native organizations and non-profits so he knows what he is doing. I plan to lean on his knowledge as much as possible for this goal.
• College scholarships are nice because they help alleviate costs for higher education. However, I would like to see this club provide activity scholarships that directly give the kids the opportunities to get the tools to earn college scholarships. This goal of the club clarifies how important it is to connect with alumni, alumni parents, and members of the community. We need people to want to help because they can understand the good that we do. Not only are they giving back to the cause but the cause needs to give back by building a stronger more unified community and also by helping build kids of character who are good citizens.