For the love of the sport
I’ll admit the extent of my wrestling career was physical education class in middle school and high school.
Maybe the biggest reason for that is because Gulf Breeze didn’t have a wrestling program when I was growing up in the 1970s.
Even if the Dolphins had fielded a wrestling program, I don’t know if I would have chosen to go out for the team. There are a lot of sports more glamorous than wrestling.
With all due respect to wrestlers every where, I can’t think of any sport that might be less glamorous than wrestling, and maybe that’s what makes the sport special.
As I stepped into the Crestview wrestling team’s practice room recently I went from chilly, windy conditions outside to a near sauna inside. Any Bulldog wrestler close to making weight shouldn’t have had any problems dropping a pound or two in the muggy conditions.
The area the Bulldog wrestlers practice is not unlike the rooms their peers at Niceville, Fort Walton Beach or Choctawhatchee use for practice. As a rule, the rooms are a little too small, and, depending on the weather outside, a lot too hot.
But those things don’t seem to bother wrestlers, who seem to participate simply for the love of the sport.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a nephew, Stuart Maddox, who is a senior on the DeLand wrestling team. As I’ve talked with Stuart about his love for the sport and watched and talked to local wrestlers, I’ve learned that wrestlers have a mindset that’s different from that of any other athletes.
A wrestler must have the endurance of a distance runner, the flexibility of a gymnast, an uncommon ability to block out pain and enough physical strength to handle another man their own size or slightly larger. Wrestlers speak a language of holds and maneuvers that only they can understand.
When a football or baseball player practices, they might do so in front of fans that drop by to see how things are going. Fans don’t tend to drop by wrestling practice, which is probably for the best.
When the day comes for the high school wrestler to take off his singlet one last time, most do so knowing while there are opportunities to wrestle at the college level, only about 300 or 400 colleges in the country have a wrestling program. And only one of those schools, Pensacola Christian, is in the state of Florida.
In the last 30 years or so, Title IX, the law that requires equal opportunities for women in sports that are afforded their male classmates, has had a huge impact on college wrestling in the deep South.
At one time almost every school in the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference had a wrestling program. But as women have picked up sports such as rowing to level out the number of scholarships, wrestling programs have disappeared at many major universities.
Several ACC schools still offer wrestling, but two schools from Florida in the ACC, Florida State and Miami, don’t field wrestling teams.
The names of All-American wrestlers Ethan Reeves and Gray Simmons at my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, are but a memory for those of us who attended school in Knoxville more than 30 years ago when wrestling was still a staple on SEC campuses.
Maybe I’m paying more attention to the plight of high school wrestlers these days because Stuart wants to wrestle in college. It looks like he’ll get a chance to do so at Coe College in Iowa, which wrestles in the NCAA Division III.
Maybe if there were more opportunities closer to home, Stuart would be staying in Florida, or at least in the southeast, to continue his wrestling career, but like every other wrestler in the state, he didn’t have the option to stay at home and wrestle.
Crestview wrestlers Tanner Vigren, Clint Lukert and Colin Smith might be facing that very decision in the days to come.
It’s just a shame that there aren’t any real opportunities for college wrestling in Florida.
