Wrestling has been long believed to be an individual sport. You are there as one person, on the mat against another person in a fight for honor. What could be more individual? And yet, year after year we see that it is teams that produce excellent wrestlers. Individuals do not make the team, it is the teams that make the individuals.
An individual requires a good coach and a good partner. In fact they need several good partners. Each partner has their wight class and because wrestling teams compete in competitions and duals as teams, it means that every weight class has their purpose. Unlike other sports where you must field a full team, in wrestling any missing spot in a line-up is points given up. So you have to think of every weight class as a position on the team. But more than that, every weight class supports the two weight classes next to them. They are the wrestling partners for the the other weight classes.
A team with one good individual and a lot of bad wrestlers will not compete well with other teams. But more importantly, that individuals without quality wrestling partners will not compete as well either. They will often pull up the wrestlers they wrestle with but they will not be pulled up without good wrestlers in the room.
To create a good team is no trivial matter. It requires not one coach but a coaching staff. It requires an organized and experienced head coach who is first and formost a great recruiter, motivator and administrator. To have a quality team requires mats, it requires resources to travel to tournaments, it requires ability to mobilize community including parents and teachers, and it requires ability to recruit other coaches and of course wrestlers.
The coaches that one recruits will define the quality of the team. There has to be a lightweight and middle and heavyweight tactician. Each position and weight class has its own wrestling style, its limitations and its strengths. The light weight wrestlers are quick and technical. The middle weights are a mixture of speed and strength. The heavy weights are all about strength and stamina. An expert who wrestled in that weight will be able to give the wrestlers personal attention and pointers for training and wrestling.
The wrestlers also have to be recruited. They may be ex-wrestlers or athletes from other sports or complete novices, but two things are important for a team: athletes who are willing to work hard, who are motivated by winning and who have some natural athletic ability. Those who are not natural athletes will often get hurt and take a long time to mature. The athletes have greater body control and awareness to pick up new moves and make them theirs. Those who want to win will want to work hard, and they will have the mentality it takes to win matches, especially the close ones.
Everything can be developed, and that is why it is important to have a good feeder program of young kids into a high school and good high school wrestlers into a college. The freshman and JV who are wrestling for the first time have to be eased into wrestling, having fun first and foremost. This is because the expectation to win has to be internal. The coach motivates not by forcing the idea of winning, but by reminding an already motivated wrestler of what they want and then helps them get there. The motivation to win comes with experience and time. The experience usually occurs when a young wrestler has trained enough to win matches, and even a tournament. The desire to keep up the performance, to win at a higher and higher level is there. As long as there is a team to support those dreams and ambitions, they will get there.
And that’s why wrestling is a team. Each position has to perform their job, not in synchrony as it happens in other team sports, but in serial fashion as it happens in other individual team sports like Gymnastics. Each athletes competes in their weight, in their position, generating points for the team and they can only do that if all other pieces are there to support them. Thus if the team is strong, so is the individual. Which is why teams like Poway, Buchanan, Clovis, Gilroy, La Costa Canyon, Rancho Bernardo, Iowa, Iowa st etc etc produce such standout individuals. Because an individual does not make a team, but a team can make an individual.
Henry-Wrestling 