My Life Had Been Taken Over By Wrestling

Suddenly my eyes flew open, the coldness slowly lingered away. My body felt warm. Almost as warm as how my mouth felt the last time I had sipped on my grandmother's tea. My grandmother always told me to have faith and to believe in the end everything would be alright. I felt the frigid saltwater against my skin. “Where am I?” I thought to myself. I couldn’t quite recall what had happened nor where I was. All that I could recall was hearing screams of innocent children and parents trying to comfort

He constantly decided how cold it was and how he didn’t like to be as cold as he was. Inevitably, the psychological factors wore his mind and soul down to make him only think how cold he was. By the end of his situation, any warmth, whether by the sleep of death or fire, was all the man could think about. Without any imagination to focus his thoughts elsewhere, the man helped himself collapse into his final doom.

My time on the mat was not always that of heart break. Going through elementary I never had a losing season, let alone a season where I lost more than five matches. In fifth and sixth grade I took place in NYWA and Gopher State. Gopher State is a tournament for the top wrestlers in Minnesota and all the states surrounding it. That was some of the hardest wrestling I have ever encountered. I placed in the top six at NYWA and not placing at Gopher state unfortunately. The summer before my junior year I went to multiple wrestling camps costing thousands of dollars and lasting weeks in time. And when it came time to vote for captains I just knew I was going to get it. The night before the coach told us who was going to be awarded captain

Wrestling has been something that has gone through our family for a long time except for me. I have been that one kid who has stopped wrestling from an injury and I will not go back to it for some reason. I get out of Jr. High and head to high school and I want a sport to do during the winter to stay in shape for football. Wrestling or basketball were my choices, I had heard that the basketball coaches split up the teams so wrong and they don’t do very hard work. Wrestling is a hard sport where you got to watch your weight and the coaches will make sure you do your best, So I went with the best choice, Wrestling.

Much of my life has been influenced by the sport of wresting. My father is the head wrestling coach of the high school I attend; my whole life I have watched the sport, and spent time with his past teams. In the fifth grade I told my father that I no longer wanted to continue wrestling; we made a deal that when I reached high school I would join the team and if I still felt that wrestling was not a sport I wanted to pursue, I could quit again and end my career. When I entered high school, my brother had already been attending the same school and wrestling for my dad on the school team, so adapting to high school and high school sports was more simple for me than other students. The winter of my freshman year I was, as I had promised my father, out for the wrestling team.

“Why Kid?” said, my grandfather. I replied, “simple, not everyone can do it, that why I love it. I love the grind, I love the self-torture, and of course the leading reason I look ripped in a singlet. Wrestling is one of the most demanding sports there is. The dedication, hard work, dieting, endless practices, and the everlasting season. Don't forget sectionals, then finally state. I can't tell you how many parties that I had to turn down during the season because I didn't want to be tempted to binge eat. The countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner I've had to give up. I felt like a dog watching everyone eat their honey roasted turkey.

The sport of wrestling became my entire life when I was eight years old and it is the reason I am the man you see today. Wrestling helped me discover who I am as a person, and it is also a big factor in the career path that I am on today. There are countless times during my wrestling career that have been life lessons and eye openers to me, one incident that stands out from the rest was the first wrestling tournament of the season.

I began wrestling since my freshman year of high school, as I have always wanted to wrestle. I did not necessarily at the sport, but I enjoyed it. I earned medals and won tournaments, and for a time I even saw myself wrestling in college. I thought that I had my future planned until I dislocated my knee. I first viewed the incident as a freak accident, but it soon happened frequently. It reached to the point where I required invasive surgery. Mulling over my surgery and repeated injuries, I concluded that wrestling became too dangerous. But I committed myself to wrestling; I had no idea what else to do. Desperate to find an activity to fill the void that athletics left behind, I decided to try something outside of my comfort zone. As a result,

Who knows if wrestling yourself is harder than wrestling others? My passion, ever since I stepped on a wrestling mat, is wrestling. Every single person was a novice, with a month advantage, and so I challenged each individual as my panacea to all my anger, sadness, stress and loneliness. The first day I made a huge impression on my coach. I hip-tossed other wrestlers and heard, “I can’t breathe, get off of me!” My skill was acknowledged as a suitable wrestler, meaning that I have heart, spirit, strength, speed, and skill. As a team we each played a role, we had to work hard, go to practice or Beat the Streets, win matches, and, ultimately, not get pinned. The most difficult task was to be in our own designated weight class; we had to control

The football season had just ended in Orem Utah and my coach was an assistant wrestling coach. People had been telling me things about wrestling the whole football season to the point where I actually considered it. I went to open mats one day and decided that I was going to wrestle. There were two other first year freshmen in my weight class and I beat both of them. In my first year of wrestling I was already varsity. The whole year I got pounded on over and over again by kids who had been wrestling for years. I kind of just accepted the fact that I was going to lose most of my matches. Our very last dual of the season was against Orem High School who were our mortal enemies. The dual started off at the 120 pound weight class. Me being in the 113 pound weight class meant I would be the last one to wrestle. The dual was incredibly close and by the time I was up Orem was winning the dual by one point. My coach told me to go out there and keep it simple. I went out, took him down, and pinned him in just fourteen seconds. The crowd exploded. Everybody started chanting my name. The captains picked me up and put me on their shoulders as they carried me around the gym. This event was important to my life because it gave me confidence that I needed, it kept me wrestling because I was on the verge of quitting, and it was a moment that I’ll never forget my entire life.

Wrestling was a sport I had no interest in, and I only tried out, because my coach recommended that I’d give it a shot. I never would of thought on my seventeenth birthday that I’d be wrestling for the conference championship. Reagan Fedowitz from Union Pines was my opponent, who placed fifth in the state tournament the year before. The tournament was held at Union Pines, so majority of the crowd were fans of Reagan. A announcer calls my name to come check in at the table, and I immediately become nervous. Although I was nervous, I used this as an advantage to become motivated for the match.

Becoming a wrestler changed my life. I’ve always been athletic, growing up I played football, baseball, and, before I wrestled, basketball. None of those sports, however, pushed me as hard, or taught me as much as wrestling.

It was halloween on an icy October day. As soon as I stepped out door 5 I felt a rush of ice cold wind blow over my face, ears, nose and torso. As I forgot a thick sweatshirt, I was only equipped with a paper thin ¼ zip sweatshirt. Roaming up and down the brook I was overwhelmed by water seamlessly flowing through the underpass, autumn leaves rustling in the air, wet and dry patches of earth. I felt the icy air flow in through my nose as I took a breath and observed the water vapor come from my breath. I am frozen. Tightly, I held my my paper as if it was my iPhone over a 10 story bridge and explore the real outdoors.

This day was cold but it was a fresh snowfall and we couldn't help but to go outside and enjoy it. We ended up with a camera in our hands to capture memories of our last days before winter break was over. My cheeks had a cold sensation and I knew they were bright red. Trying pull my coat down to my fingers became harder every minute but I didn’t even care about being cold because I was having the time of my life. As we stepped through the snow that had piled high the previous night, the tips of our fingers started to feel cold and dry and the snow found its way into our boots. None of that mattered though because we were only focused on how beautiful it was outside; how the snow fell almost perfectly onto the trees around us, how it was so

It was Friday, December 24, 2010 and I was living in Ohio, Cleveland, USA. At 3:00 p.m sharp, the school bell rang and I began walking home from school in snow that was nearly as high as me. Students, tall and small ran out of the school and gleamed with joy because Christmas break had officially begun! There was no school for two weeks! I smiled while watching the students jump with joy! My attention suddenly switched to how cold was it outside. The wind howled, piling up snow in drifts, and blinded my sight with ice-white dust. I protected my eyes with my arms while attempting to walk deliberately on the sidewalk. The trees, houses, and the road loomed into my vision, then vanished, swallowed in white as I walked. Despite the fact that my house was only two minutes away from my school (Bettes Elementary), I felt like these two minutes were the coldest two minutes of my entire life!