Fargo 2010 – Day 11

From Coach John Schmidtke:

I love coaching kids in the highest level of competition.  We all do.

The word “coach” derives from the horse drawn carriages that transported people from one place to another.  In the early 1800s it was used for an academic tutor – slang for someone who “carried” a student through an exam.  In the 1860s it started to be applied to athletics.  That makes good sense; a coach is someone who takes an athlete from where he or she is now to where he or she wants to be in the future.

Coaching involves trust on multiple levels.  Parents trust the coach to develop their child into a good wrestler and, more importantly, a good person who learns to lead a good life through the lessons taught by wrestling.  They entrust their sons and daughters to the coach in the hope that the athlete will learn the value of hard work in the pursuit of a worthy goal.  They hope the athlete will learn to win with grace and lose with dignity (most hope for more lessons in grace than in dignity).

The athlete entrusts the coach with his or her dreams of athletic success.  The athlete trusts the coach to be technically competent and tactically attuned, armed with a plan for success on the mat.

The coach trusts the athlete to take what the coach knows of the sport and to try his or her hardest to turn that knowledge into success.  Success, in the shallowest but also the most powerful sense, shows up as a place on the medal stand.   It is powerful because an athlete on the medal stand is tangible proof that the coaches’ lessons were learned.

As coaches, we invest so much time and emotion into helping our athletes achieve success that when an athlete’s run at the medal stand ends, a hollowness paradoxically fills the void where the dreams used to be.  And it is always a surprise when that happens.

So in the morning session, when Cassidy Oshiro lost to Anthony Ashnault from New Jersey to exit the tournament one match short of being a double All American, it seemed to be a mistake.  Surely his impressive run at the medal stand couldn’t be over.  But it suddenly was.

And then our Junior freestyle team went down, wrestler after wrestler – Ryan, Brady, and Todd all going 1-2; Christian, Sean, David Arcangel, Nalu, Kevin, Evan, and Marcus all going 0-2 – each coming close to advancing by another round but each falling short early in the tournament, until only David Terao remained at 119, with a bevy of under-employed coaches in his corner, but he remained only until the fifth round, when Hunter Weber of Wisconsin handed him his second loss (2-1, 1-1).  David finished 3-2.

What to do when you’re done?  The kids went to eat ice cream.  Some coaches stayed to watch the wrestling.  Some went to meetings.  Some went to take naps.  I walked to the Bison Arena to watch, just for a minute, Coach Ku’u leading a weight-making practice for the ladies (weigh in tomorrow morning) and then headed to the Dining Facility for some truly terrible taco casserole topped with runny salsa – food imitating life.  At 9:15 p.m. I joined Coach Dany and our eight ladies in the basement meeting room of their dorm for 25 minutes of relaxation, imagery, and visualization.  The ladies seem completely ready for their tournament – physically, technically, and mentally. 

I came away from the visualization session refreshed and tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. I get another chance to coach athletes who are pursuing their dreams and mine.