Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Introducing a new athlete to the sport of wrestling is challenging. Wrestling is the ultimate strategy game. Correspondingly, just like any strategy game there is a major mental aspect to the game. In this sport, it’s common to see smart wrestlers completely dominate physically superior athletes.

With this in mind, I find it odd how little time many coaches spend on the strategy, especially with beginners. Yes, wrestling is an extremely physical sport. However, I believe in the early stages of teaching novice wrestlers the sport coaches should treat it as a strategy game no different than any other strategy game.

Every strategy game has four basic components.

1. Rules
2. Best Practices
3. Tricks
4. NO, NOs

I believe teaching new wrestlers strategy from the viewpoint of these components would benefit them tremendously.

Rules

Out of the four components, rules are usually the easiest to teach. Despite this, in the sport of wrestling it’s quite hard.

The rules of wrestling change from year to year without fail. Whether it’s a nuance of an out of bounds rule, hands to the face, or the specifics of what makes a takedown a takedown, the rules of folkstyle wrestling are far too complex. This is why it’s so important to educate beginners on not only the basic rules, but also introduce them to the controversial nuances.

What’s more, many parents, assistant/volunteer coaches, and experienced wrestlers could use a rule refresher at the start of each season. It’s really too bad that the practice of reviewing and teaching the rules is not commonplace in our sport.

Best Practices

From my vantage point, it appears that the average coach does a good job teaching beginners best practices. Analysis was done by Arizona State wrestling coach Zeke Jones back in 2015 of the moves with the highest success rate at the NCAA wrestling tournament. The results were that 82% of the successful takedowns were the result of 4 moves:

• Single Leg,
• Go behind,
• Double leg, and
• High Crotch

These takedowns are examples of best practices that almost every wrestling coach emphasizes with beginners.

Tricks

Coaches are always hesitant to teach beginners tricks. The thought is that if you teach a beginner a trick move that works for them, they will depend on it too much instead of the basics. Although this may be true in many cases, I believe it’s still important to introduce these moves for a very specific reason. If you don’t know about the trick moves, you are vulnerable to have them done on you. For this reason, teaching trick moves and the defense for those moves should be part of every beginners year 1 introduction to the sport.

A few of the more common trick moves in wrestling include:

• Headlock
• Quarter nelson
• Cement mixer
• Merkle
• Peterson
• Spladle

NO, NOs

From my experience, new wrestlers only learn about the NO, NOs after it cost them a match. Simple things like:

1. Reaching back when in the bottom position
2. Putting your head close to your knee in defensive positions
3. Shooting with your head down
4. Standing flat footed or crossing your legs in the neutral position
5. Tying your opponent up without a plan to use the tie up
6. Reaching with your lead leg hand in the neutral position
7. Dropping your head to the mat in the bottom position

These are all things that wrestlers must avoid like the plague. Specifically reviewing these positions and the consequences on a regular basis pays huge dividends in the long run.