Wrestling Requires and Reveals Courage

By Katie Downing

It is only a matter of time before a wrestler is asked, “Why do you love wrestling?  What is so great about wrestling?”  Personally, I could write an entire article just about the things I love about wrestling and why I think it is so great.  One answer that many people from all parts of the wrestling community give is that wrestling so often parallels life in so many ways.  One of these ways can be found in courage, and courage in wrestling compares to courage in life in two ways.

First, certain events or circumstances in life will either require you to find courage within yourself or to re-evaluate the courage you thought you had to face overwhelming challenges.  You will sometime have to move forward, knowing that it will be difficult to endure the challenges ahead.  Second, there will be times in life that you have to find the courage to take risks even though you don’t know if you will succeed or not.  There are some times in life that nothing will happen unless you go out and make it happen.

Last fall at the World Cup, the women’s national coach, Terry Steiner, spoke to the team in between sessions.  He told us that you have to have lots of discipline and lots of courage in order to be successful in wrestling.  The discipline part is something for another article, but the things Coach Steiner said about courage made me take another look at my wrestling.  I realized that I had lost matches because I didn’t have the courage to take the risks in order to open up situations on the mat where I could score.  I wanted to control my opponent, the pace and the action of the whole match.  But when I got behind in points, I didn’t go out and make it happen because I was too worried that the right openings weren’t there.  I had to realize that you can’t always control the whole match and the perfect openings are hardly ever there in live competition.  I also had to realize that sometimes the best way to control a match and an opponent is to go out there and create motion, and to take the risks that will open up scoring opportunities.  You can control an opponent just by creating so much action that they are always reacting to your offence.

There are times in life and in wrestling when you have to go out and take the risks so that you have a shot at optimum results, even though you don’t know if you will succeed or if your risks will create the openings you were aiming for.  Other times, you know exactly what is going to happen, and you have to find the courage to endure tough challenges.  In wrestling, every day practices are often tests of endurance, and you know how hard the conditioning is going to be, or how tiring the live goes will be, or how tough your partners are.  It isn’t so much a matter of courage when you know practice is going to be tough, and you know that you will have to complete everything your coach puts before you.  The part where courage comes in is how you go about enduring each practice.  Any wrestler can just make it through practice.  The people who can’t don’t last on the team for very long.  It takes courage to push yourself to your own limits in each practice.  Anyone can sprint, but only you know how hard you can run, and you are the one who makes the choice to pace yourself or to go out and make it happen.  Sure, you may feel like you’re dogging it by the last sprint if you go all out during the first one, but that’s the risk you have to take from the very beginning. 

It also takes courage to face the best partners in the room.  You know who you can beat and who you can’t, or who you can float through practice with and who will push you the whole time.  You have to make the choice to face the partners who are better, bigger, stronger, or faster than you so that you will get the most out of every practice.  It takes that bit of courage to get yourself into your weakest situations on the mat during live goes in practice, even if you don’t score a single point the entire time.  It’s facing your weakest areas in practice that will take you to the next level in competition.  You have the choice to evaluate the courage you have on the competition mat and in practice.  You have the ability to choose the times you want to take risks and the times you can push yourself to do more than just make it through practice.  You may also find that the courage you’ve developed on the mat may help you find the courage to face the overwhelming circumstances in life.