Football and Wrestling

As a line coach, I would give the invite to the OLine. Not a lot of other sports the horizontally challenged kids can play. I love wrestling, coached it myself. Talk to the HC (football). Explain it to him. Alot of schools make it mandatory for players to be in another sport, specifically one such as wrestling that actually has some relation to football. Every wrestler that played football has bettered themself on the field from doing both. It also develops a little toughness.

Wrestling is seen as being too tough for a lot of kids, especially big guys, in this day and age. They see all the conditioining and weight cuts as being too high of a mountain to climb.

Anything that you can do to inject some fun and break down those stereotypes will get you kids. Tell kids that they do not have to cut weight, they can still lift during practice. They are guaranteed to get some matches. Play football in the gym for conditioning. Keep practices as short as you can and still get the job done.

There is a select group of kids in every area that are very dedicated, very good, and wrestle all year long. This is seen as the standard to some kids and more than they want to do. Tell them that they can still be an in-season wrestler and not do the year around thing and still contribute. Otherwise wrestling is going to be a dying sport.

Wrestling is the best crossover sport for lineman period!

I don't care how big and strong you are, if you can't move, you can't play IMO.

Accentuating the benfits of wrestling by using all of the past and current pro football players is one thing you can do. Stephen Neal of the NE Patriots being the gold standard. Having the football coach on board in probably the most important thing overall.

It is a very tough sport, both physically and mentally. It takes guts just to go out there and put it on the line. There's no where to hide and no way to make excuses. That alone discourages a lot of kids.

As far as weight cutting goes, that's a bunch of BS! How many high school kids do you know who can't make the 285 lb limit? If they can't, they probably need to.

I've coached for 23 years. Coached 12 or so D1 lineman. None of them played above 300 lbs in high school. With the rare exception, kids above 300 lbs in high school can't adequetely carry that kind of weight and be very good.

Here in So California, I've heard that the Servite football coach tells their OL and DL they must participate in wrestling. I don't know if it's true but it sounds good to me.

I'm all for anyone who plays football wrestling regardless of their weight. When I was a young JV coach I had a defense with 8 wrestlers as starters. The biggest one was about a 165 lbs. Those kids were butt kickers! The other teams being bigger or faster meant nothing to these guys. Wrestling kids are usually just tougher than most. There's a reason that the Special Forces recruiters come on campus looking for the wrestling room.

Concerning how to combat the difficulty of wrestling, you can't! It is what is is and what it is is basically a controlled fight. A lot of kids say use excuses like wrestlers are "gay" or want to touch other guys, blah, blah, blah! It's all just to hide the fact that they are afraid. Like I said, without the ability to blame someone else for your failure (like in football), many kids won't take that chance.

When I get young kids who've never wrestled before or older kids who come out, I try and pump up the fact that they're doing something that others are afraid to do. I let them know how gutsy they are to come out and put it on the line. I tell them it's supposed to be hard. Most things that are worthy are hard. In today's MMA culture, I tell them how 95% of the MMA champs are ex-wreslters and how they kick everyone's fanny. Above all, I try and continually encourage them. Let me tell you though, I lose kids who don't win right away sometimes but the ones that stay, in most cases, have turned out to be some of the best guys I've coached.

Illiniwek,
thanks for the link. I watched a bit of it, but will watch more tomorrow. Good stuff.

Boltar, we've heard all the excuses you've given. We just have to keep struggling against them. Our best senior DL has wrestled the last two years. Wrestling helped him tremendously, but his record on the mat was BAD. I think he only won like 5 matches in 2 years. He worked his tail off, but it just never clicked for him. To be honest I can't say that I blame him too much. We have a frosh at one weight class that would beaten him and a soph at another that prolly would have beaten him. I think him not coming out hurt us w/ other kids, too.

It's hard to keep them out when they are seeing any success and are working their tails off.

I started coaching wrestling this year as a volunteer assistant at my high school, there was no assistant for this year, so I did it mostly to have on the resume and to learn because I knew little about the sport.

I love it now, and have also started helping on the middle school level as well. I am telling as many kids as I can that they should wrestle. I get on the mat sometimes to work with our only heavyweight, who also plays ol/dl on the football team. We aren't a great team, I think we are 4-13 on the season, but we have some young talent. We have 1 kid that is a year round wrestler, he lives for it, camps, wrestling clubs, tournaments year round. But, everybody else is inseason only. About half the team plays football, and some have shown some promise on the mats this year.

It is tough for us to get kids out for wrestling, and many that come out don't stay. We had one quit last week right before a match. He made weight twice all season even though he was 131 when he took his hydration test and was wrestling 135. A few more quit because of family issues, and some quit because they weren't able to handle the conditioning and stuff.

The local college is D2, and has a top 5 program that makes nationals and has wrestlers win individual nationa championships, and the kids at our school want to win, but many of them don't want to work. The college coach and wrestlers have come in to talk to them about how much work it takes to win like that, but they think they don't have to do the work.

I am seeing how much wrestling can benefit football players, and think that more of them should be out for the team, but we can't get them out for it. We had 7 kids at the last practice. Now we are snowed in down here, and haven't practiced since friday. I know the kids will be out of shape when they get back, and we will be starting almost over with conditioning.

Ok, so what skills and techniques are more or less directly transferable from wrestling to football?

I'm looking for stuff to teach the football player during the summer to get them more comfortable in the wrestling room.

The weight thing is or has been an issue for us. For example, we had a kid a few years ago who wrestled and played football. He was a pretty highly recruiting DL at one point, and he wanted to get his weight up around 240-250. He simply could not do it. Lots of reasons, but he would work his tail off and lose a ton of weight just through the normal course of practice.

A lot of our kids say they want to lift for football or baseball. One kid, who does jiu jitsu, this year said he wanted to keep in shape by running "indoor" track.

Going from 215 to 240 for most kids after wrestling season takes all of about 2 months. I've seen kids gain 20 lbs in two weeks. Now it's not all muscle but it is weight. Then again, the chances that a kid is going to gain 25 lbs of muscle from going into the weight room isn't going to happen either.

Going into the weight room is fine but I'd rather have a kid who was battling and improving his toughness, footwork, balance, etc through wrestling than just trying to get bigger in the weight room. There's too many intangibles gained in wrestling that aren't found in the weight room.

Again, to each his own, but I still believe that wrestling can improve every football player.