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Few sports are as intense as wrestling. The physical training demands total dedication. The mental side requires focus, anticipation and resilience. No letup. No excuses.
Wrestling Tough, Second Edition, will inspire and guide you to achieve the mind-set of a champion. Whether you need to identify the flaws of an opponent, get optimally psyched for a big match, or overcome the adversity inherent in participating in the sport, Wrestling Tough will prepare you to excel and win.
Mike Chapman, known for his unique expertise, analysis, and insight into the great sport of wrestling, has had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with many of America’s greatest amateurs and professional wrestlers. In the second edition of Wrestling Tough, he shares his insights to take you beyond the physical attributes needed to succeed on the mat:
• Explore the attacking mind-set and the importance of psyching up for competition.
• Gain perspective on the increasing popularity of the sport among women and girls and how female participants are proving their toughness on the mat at all levels.
• Examine the rise and importance of funk-style wrestling, through which an individual’s personality is allowed—and encouraged—to shine.
• Glimpse the key moments in the careers of many great wrestlers and the training methods they used to break through barriers and achieve ultimate success.
Wrestling Tough is loaded with stories, insights, and coaching philosophies from legendary coaches and wrestlers such as Cael Sanderson, Dan Gable, Lee Kemp, John Smith, Tom Brands, and Steve Fraser, and even coaches from other sports such as basketball’s John Wooden and football’s Vince Lombardi. These stories will captivate wrestlers, coaches, and fans of wrestling alike.
Make your mind a key weapon in your wrestling arsenal. Wrestling Tough provides you the ammunition to develop the mental firepower to win and dominate on the mat.
Part I. The Path to Wrestling Tough
Chapter 1. Choosing to Wrestle
Chapter 2. Understanding Toughness
Chapter 3. Building Confidence
Chapter 4. Dedicating and Committing to Goals
Chapter 5. Gaining Desire and Discipline
Chapter 6. Adding Intensity and Effort
Chapter 7. Achieving the Right Mind-Set
Chapter 8. Searching for The Zone
Chapter 9. Paying the Price
Chapter 10. Dealing With Adversity
Part II. Essentials for Wrestling Tough
Chapter 11. Mind–Body Link
Chapter 12. Art of Preparation
Chapter 13. Sense of Fun
Chapter 14. Spirit for Competition
Chapter 15. Overcoming Obstacles
Chapter 16. Will to Win
Chapter 17. Power of Heart
Chapter 18. Attacking Mind-Set
Chapter 19. Mental Wrestling Mastery
Chapter 20. Life–Wrestling Balance
Chapter 21. Enduring Lessons of Wrestling
Mike Chapman is the founder and former executive director of the International Wrestling Institute and Museum, now called the National Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum. He is the author of 30 books, 17 of which are about wrestling. He has written over 700 columns on the sport of wrestling, with his work appearing in a dozen national magazines. He has appeared on ESPN, Fox Sports, Iowa Public Television, and A&E Network and has been featured in numerous documentaries on the sport. The former director of communications for USA Wrestling, Chapman has attended 46 NCAA wrestling tournaments, two Olympics, and three world championships.
Chapman has been named National Wrestling Writer of the Year five times and was co-winner of WIN magazine’s Impact of the Year Award in 1999. He is a member of 10 halls of fame, including the AAU Wrestling Hall of Fame and the National Wresting Hall of Fame and Museum. In 2002, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in wrestling from the Cauliflower Alley Club. He is also the founder of WIN magazine and originated both the WIN Memorabilia Show and the Dan Hodge Trophy, considered by many the top award in collegiate wrestling.
“Wrestling Tough is much more than learning about being successful on the mat. It’s for all who would like to dominate or develop a passion for any sport. Incredible reading! Get energized and be entertained at the same time.”
—Dan Gable, Olympic Champion Wrestler, Two-Time NCAA Champion Wrestler, Olympic Wrestling Coach, and 15-Time NCAA Championship Team Coach
“Simply put, Mike Chapman is the most prolific, knowledgeable, respected, and published wrestling writer ever. Everything Mike writes is worth reading, and I highly recommend this new edition of Wrestling Tough.”
—Wayne Baughman, Olympic and World Team Wrestler and Coach
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!
Toughness spans both genders
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
Through the years, it has become obvious that toughness is not a quality exclusive to males, and there is no better example than Helen Maroulis.
One of the biggest developments in wrestling over the past 15 years is the increase in the number of females taking to the mats. Though women have been wrestling in small numbers around the globe for centuries, it wasn't until the early 1990s that they really began to make progress in the United States, with Tricia Saunders taking the lead in dramatic fashion.
Born Patricia McNaughton in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she grew up in a family heavily involved in wrestling and tagged along with her brothers to practices. At age nine, she began competing against boys and enjoyed tremendous success, showing that girls can be tough too. Entering her teen years, Tricia focused on competition with girls only, and embarked upon a career that culminated in her being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and the FILA International Wrestling Hall of Fame.
During her senior-level career, Saunders won 11 national titles and never lost to an American. At the world championships, she captured four gold medals and one silver medal. Her husband, Townsend Saunders, won a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics, but Tricia competed before women's wrestling was included in the Olympic Games. That didn't happen until 2004.
With Tricia Saunders standing as a beacon to any woman interested in competing in wrestling, women entered the sport in increasing numbers throughout the 2000s. By 2017, the United States had won 15 gold medals at the world championships, including three by Adeline Gray, to rank fourth on the list of total gold medals by any nation.
In 2016, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to strike gold in the Olympic Games. And she did it in stunning fashion: defeating Japan's Saori Yoshida, who is the most decorated female wrestler of all time, with 13 world titles and three Olympic gold medals to her credit.
In 2017, Maroulis claimed the world title at 128 pounds, dominating the field by huge margins. It was her third straight world/Olympic gold medal, all in different weight classes. She was a 2015 world champion at 121 pounds and won the 2016 Olympic title at 116.5 pounds. In late 2017, she was a finalist for the Female Olympic Athlete of the Year award, showing how far women's wrestling has come in a short amount of time.
The route Maroulis took to her historic Olympic victory was very difficult. She dedicated herself to a stunning physical regimen and then relied on two of her finest qualities: mental toughness and her Christian faith. In a column for the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. Magazine, publisher Bryan Van Kley described her journey.
“I've come to realize this wasn't really an upset,” wrote Van Kley. “The Maroulis camp knew this was coming and had been working toward it for the better part of three years. But like any epic sports accomplishment, Helen still had to execute.”
Much of the credit for her success goes to Valentin Kalika, her personal trainer and coach. Maroulis moved from Michigan to California to train with the former Soviet Union national champion, who had devised a plan to beat Yoshida. The plan involved a commitment that would push Maroulis to the absolute limit of her stamina, both mentally and physically.
“Kalika said they did ‘crazy' drills and training situations that ‘no one else in the world would have been willing to do' to prepare Helen for success and the Yoshida match in particular,” continued Van Kley in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. “She had to endure endless footwork drills in the sands of a beach, working to the point of exhaustion. She worked like few others have ever worked in pursuit of an athletic goal.”
And it took its toll on her.
“Up until a few days before completion, she was a mess,” Kevin Black, who served as her spiritual mentor, said of her emotional state of mind. “But she stayed committed, and we had a group of people praying for her. She believed God would protect her heart and mind. He said he would, and he did!” Black said, referring to a verse from the Bible in Philippians 4:6-7.
After her monumental victory, Maroulis told the media how important her faith was to her performance, putting the emphasis on a point of mental preparation that Ben and John Peterson had tapped into during their Olympic triumphs in 1972 and 1976. “All I said over and over again is, ‘Christ is in me, and I am enough.' That was one of the most freeing things I ever said. I don't need to be perfect.”
She used that calming thought process to do away with any fear she may have felt previously. As she said in the September 14, 2016, issue of W.I.N. in her interview with Brian Van Kley, “I just didn't want to look at Goliath and get scared. I don't pray for victory. I prayed to free myself from myself because I can get in my own head. I don't want to lose because I was afraid. I just said, ‘God, I want to be free from fear.'
“I kind of forgot that I was wrestling for a gold medal. I dreamed about this match so much that I was just wrestling her.”
In an article in Sports Illustrated, in November, 2016, Maroulis offered even more insight into her odyssey. She said that as a young girl she was afraid of almost everything in life, and it was only after discovering wrestling at age seven that she began to find some degree of inner peace and security. Her parents were both against her wrestling, but she persisted, and they eventually grew to embrace her efforts.
An amazing result of her Olympic triumph came when John Harbaugh, one of the top coaches in the NFL, invited her to speak to his Baltimore Ravens football team before a game. Harbaugh told his players: “I met Helen Maroulis, the gal from Maryland who we saw beat a legendary Japanese champion in wrestling. And when you beat a legend, you become a legend.”
Maroulis talked to the Ravens that day and left them with this final thought: “You don't have to be the best. You just have to have enough. And on that day, I was enough” (Maroulis, 2016). And tough enough, one might add!
Sally Roberts is another example of the mental toughness that can be channeled into wrestling. A four-time national champion and two-time world bronze medalist, Roberts has created an organization called “Wrestle Like a Girl.” Based in Colorado Springs, it is a not-for-profit company with the mission of promoting the educational value of the sport for girls of all ages and for young women who may have been at risk. She speaks candidly about how she used her toughness to build a new future, including a business to help other women wrestlers.
“I came from a really challenging background,” said Roberts. “Through my career and journey in wrestling, I started to come into my own and became a beneficial member to society rather than just being the delinquent child who was getting ready to be sent to juvenile detention.”
Helen Maroulis (top) has Hanbit Kim of Korea in serious trouble during this key match in the 2017 world championships. Maroulis won the match and claimed her third straight world-level title.
In a column written by Sandy Stevens for W.I.N. Magazine, Roberts explained that she had tried other sports before wrestling, but she had been cut from those programs. “Some people find wrestling, and for some people, wrestling finds them. I fell in love with a sport that accepted me as I was, a gritty girl who needed direction, support, and inclusion in a positive manner.”
Her goal now is to show at-risk girls how wrestling can make a positive difference in their lives. She and her group are involved with setting up camps and clinics across the nation and in helping start programs in high schools and colleges for girls. Through wrestling, she was able to change grittiness into toughness and become a winner on and off the mat.
By the end of 2017, there were an estimated 15,000 girls wrestling in high schools across the nation, showing an increase for 27 straight years. In addition, there were 44 college wrestling programs in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association at the start of 2018.
USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, had 13,339 registered female wrestlers in 2017, a figure that has grown for nine consecutive years. The same is true for the nation's other major wrestling organization. The AAU was formed in 1888 and has been offering programs for all sizes and ages for over a century, and now it offers them for both genders. In 2000, it reported 701 female youth wrestlers, and by 2017, that number had risen to 1,921.
Wrestling has greatly strengthened its base by welcoming women to the sport, and the women have responded with excitement, passion, commitment—and toughness!
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity
Jordan Burroughs’ struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs.
Jordan Burroughs' struggle with adversity came after a poor performance in the 2016 Olympics and grew to epic proportions. From 2011 to 2015, no one in wrestling was riding higher than Burroughs. In his final two seasons at the University of Nebraska, he captured NCAA titles and won the Dan Hodge Trophy as the nation's top college wrestler of 2011. Entering international competition immediately, he went on one of the most spectacular rides in U.S. history. He won the world championships at 163 pounds in 2011 and Olympic gold in 2012 and followed up with world titles in 2013 and 2015 after earning a bronze medal in 2014.
Heading into the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Husker was considered the heavy favorite to win his fifth world-level gold medal at 163 pounds.
But disaster struck. After an opening round win, Burroughs was beaten twice and eliminated from the medal rounds. To make matters worse, the last loss was by an 11-1 score! America's brightest mat star came home with a shattered self-image. He even considered retiring from the sport he loved.
“After such a forgettable performance, my mystique had vanished heading into 2017,” he wrote. “The superhero bravado that had taken years to acquire was gone, and what remained was vulnerability and a man stripped of his identity. As I cried on camera, I instantly became a fading superstar, while hungry, younger talent waited to stake claim as America's next 74-kilogram wrestler” (Burroughs 2017, 8).
What transpired in the coming months was the result of intense introspection and working on a plan with his two Nebraska mentors, coaches Mark Manning and Bryan Snyder. Together, they developed a plan to put Burroughs back on the top of his game. He withstood a rugged trials to make the U.S. team and then landed in Paris for the world championships, eager to once again show that he was among the elite wrestlers on the globe.
Jordan Burroughs (right) works for control against an opponent during the 2017 world championships held in Paris, France. The American superstar won his fourth world title to go along with his Olympic gold medal from 2012.
Burroughs won again and regained the superstar status he had longed for. He credits his faith in God and the support of family and friends. And, importantly, he ignored the negativity that had struck at him from external forces.
“When I made the decision to come back to wrestle, I also made a point to turn a blind eye to most of the Internet world and the negativity that can be a distraction from greatness,” he wrote. “I stayed out of the forums and refrained from reading YouTube comments. I blocked all social media trolls. I had to have unwavering focus. This gave me the ability to manage the amount of praise and criticism that entered my mind and heart” (Burroughs 2017, 43).
Burroughs won all five matches in Paris to capture his fifth world-level gold medal. He is now tied with Bruce Baumgartner for second place on the list of America's gold medal winners on the international stage. Only John Smith, who has won six world-level championships, is ahead of him.
Like Lee Kemp, another great 163-pounder nearly four decades earlier, Burroughs had to learn the powerful lessons that come from adversity. After winning three NCAA championships for the University of Wisconsin, Kemp immediately turned his focus on the international scene. In 1978, he became the youngest world champion in American history (an honor that now belongs to Kyle Snyder), winning gold at 163 pounds in Mexico City when he was just 21 years and eight months old. He credits facing adversity and overcoming it with helping him climb to the highest rungs of success.
“As I reflect back, I have learned that the struggles and trials I experienced early in my life were actually shaping me for the man I was to become, and without them, I certainly would not have had the intense desire to be successful and to feel important and feel like I belonged somewhere,” wrote Kemp in his 2017 book, Winning Gold: Success Secrets of a World Champion (7). He said that he had felt unwanted after being given up at birth and living in foster homes for the first five years of his life before being adopted.
“I do not remember much about that part of my life, other than feeling alone and insignificant,” he wrote. After discovering wrestling, Lee entered onto a path to self-respect. “My success story started at age 14 when I was in ninth grade, just nine years out of foster homes” (Kemp 2017, 7-8). Little more than six years later, he was a world champion!
Wayne Baughman has one of the most distinguished pedigrees in American wrestling, winning 16 national titles (in college, freestyle, Greco-Roman and sambo). He also made three Olympic and eight world teams and coached at the international level for years. In addition, he served as head coach at the Air Force Academy for 27 seasons.
“Adversity is a reality of life and wrestling. Overcoming adversity is necessary to becoming a productive and contributing citizen and a winning wrestler,” he said in 2017. “Adversity builds character and strength. Adversity generates creative thinking and positive response/reaction to stress. Adversity forces problem solving.
“Adversity is not pleasant, but overcoming adversity has great personal reward. It builds confidence. We learn more from our failures than our successes, more from our defeats than our victories. I went over every loss many times, analyzing over and over what I'd done wrong and what I could have done better or more correctly/effectively. I never thought much about the victories.”
Baughman grew up on an Indian reservation and learned to fight early on as a matter of self-preservation. “The prejudices, the resentment, the hostility, the animosity, the anger I faced growing up, some of which was self-inflicted, made me more motivated and determined to overcome, prove people wrong and succeed.
“It is not the fun, enjoyable, likable endeavors in life that make us most successful and productive. It is learning, preparing, working hard to overcome challenges that truly give us the greatest satisfaction, self-actualization, and sense of accomplishment.
“Anyone can do the things that they find likable, fun, and enjoyable. That's a little hedonistic. It takes discipline, determination, dedication, initiative, and hard work to accomplish those things that are most difficult, rewarding, and worthwhile. I doubt it is a direct quote, and I believe it was Rob Koll, at a clinic, who said if you want to build champions, find out what they don't like to do and make them do it. Nothing worth having comes cheap or easy.
“Among the greatest satisfactions in life is to do a tough, challenging, demanding job well. Success in life and wrestling must be earned through preparation, hard work, and sacrifice. It will never come easy.”
Making wrestling more appealing to the public
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time.
Attempts at making wrestling more appealing to the public and appearing to be more fun for the athletes reflect a trend with many ups and downs over time. And while for decades, most coaches, wrestlers, and fans have accepted the notion that wrestling is more a tough and demanding discipline than a fun activity, there have been some who saw it differently.
“The irony is we took the approach a couple years before Penn State,” said Rob Koll, head coach at Cornell University since 1993 and the most successful coach in Ivy League conference history. “We started doing things like Redman videos, and we showed the personalities our wrestlers and coaches through Flo and various other video concepts.”
Redman videos were designed to be entertaining. They depict an actor who is covered in a bright-red, form-fitting body mask and a Cornell singlet doing crazy things around the campus, including dancing to some very up-tempo music. The videos are short and provide a very interesting “come on” for fringe fans to get excited about Cornell wrestling. It's a very innovative approach and makes wrestling look like a fun activity. “That was when Facebook was king,” Koll said. “We also sent it out to our list-serve. We probably did 50 videos, and people can see them on our Cornell Wrestling Facebook video section.
“At the time we took a little grief for trying to make wrestling fun. Our focus was to be the alternate to Iowa. Since then, PSU has taken over because they have been winning the championship. To our defense, we haven't had a bad run.” Cornell finished second in the NCAA in both 2010 and 2011.
Bottom line, said Koll, is that “I do think it is important to enjoy your wrestling experience.”
John Smith took the same approach at the start of the 2017 season. He and Oklahoma State women's softball coach Kenny Gajewski engaged in a promotional event called “Mat versus Bat.” Gajewski, wearing head gear and surrounded by members of his women's softball team, brought a bat to the mat with him for a little extra support and suspense, while Smith arrived with a group of bouncing, excited mat aides, all shouting encouragement to him. Loud, peppy music blared as the two contestants squared off. The “match” itself was funny and well-choreographed, with Smith scoring the pin, of course.
Greg Strobel, a two-time NCAA champion at Oregon State who had long stints as a freestyle coach at USA Wrestling and then as head coach at Lehigh University, has always been a proponent of the sport being fun, dating all the way back to his preteen years in Oregon. “I had three older brothers who wrestled. Bob started it all; I was 10 years younger than Bob. We all wrestled at home—it was flat-out fun! And all through high school and college, I just had fun when I wrestled. I loved it right from the start. In fact, I was shocked to find out that other people didn't enjoy it—good grief!”
But he also added a qualifier: “There are things you've got to learn to love. I hated to speak in public when I first was asked to do it, after winning the NCAA (at 190 pounds in 1973, and being voted O.W., as well).But the more I did it and the better I got at it, I began to like it. And even to love it.”
Strobel developed his theory that wrestling should be fun during his first coaching job at Roseburg High School in Oregon. “I really didn't know anything about coaching at that point, but I just felt kids would come back if they had fun,” he said. “That was my goal—to make it fun. I tried to make every practice different, make it interesting . . . not just drilling all the time.
“We had full gyms for most of our meets. I had volunteers call up former wrestlers and ask them why they didn't come to the meets and support the team. Many of them said they didn't like wrestling when they did it . . . cutting weight, running, push-ups, continuous drilling. They all said they liked the wrestling part but not the other parts.
“So I told my teams, ‘Hey, this is not the weight-cutting team or the push-ups team or the calisthenics team. It's the wrestling team.' I believe wrestling is inherently fun and hard work is fun, too. It's fun to work hard towards a goal that you believe in.
“Left to their own devices, I believe kids love to wrestle. Coaches and parents screw it up.”
But losing is never fun!
One of the best examples of the philosophy Strobel tried to implement at Lehigh came in the 2002 NCAA tournament when Rob Rohn battled his way into the finals of the 184-pound class. “Rohn did an unbelievable job just getting to the finals,” said Strobel. “He was seeded eighth and only had two pins all season long. Rohn said he had three goals: to relax, have fun, and be the national champion.”
In the finals, he was trailing Oklahoma's Josh Lambrecht by a 14-2 score when Rohn hit a move called the cement mixer and scored a stunning pin. He had achieved all three of his goals, one of which was to have fun!