Every wrestler has gone through injuries.

The worst part is that you can never plan for them, which leads to the inevitable battle between your heart and your head and sifting through advice from a myriad of supporters when it comes to dealing with it.

This is what World Silver Medalist Jake Herbert faces at this very moment with his second career shoulder injury.

“It happened about three weeks before the World Championships,” Herbert explained. “I was working out trying to prepare and I felt it. And this isn’t the first time I tore my labrum so when it happened I knew what it was.”

Immediately, Herbert started weighing his options. Having been there and done that, his first instinct was to just deal with the pain and compete. Which ultimately didn’t go in his favor after dropping his one and only match at the World Championships

“By no means am I using my shoulder injury as an excuse of how things went for me at Worlds,” Herbert said. “Fortunately, I was able to get it numbed up in order to compete, but things just didn’t go my way. After that I figured I would just get some rest and do some rehab, but that didn’t work.”

Herbert has concluded he is down to three options.

“I can just deal with it how it is and just wrestle,” Herbert said. “I am confident enough that I can still compete with these guys and make another Olympic Team. But the goal isn’t to just make the team, it’s to bring back a medal, and if I was to just deal with it and wrestle I don’t think that I could do that the way it is now.”

The other two options both involve surgery, with one being a bit more extreme than the other.

“The last time this happened to me, I got my shoulder scoped and it fixed the issue because, fortunately, it wasn’t that bad of a tear,” admitted Herbert. “If I do that again, then I’ll be off for a bit and back by January. Or, I can get the full surgery, be out for 6-8 months and miss the (Olympic) Trials. If that happens I’d have to petition for a wrestle-off and everything.”

With those options laid out in front of him he’s not sure which way to go with his future as a competitor on the line.

“I would love to just be able to deal with it, but it’s affecting my training,” he said. “There’s only so much I can do right now. Your window to wrestle is only so short that you have to take advantage of the opportunity when you can. You really have to walk through hell to be successful in this sport.”



Still fueled by the dream of being an Olympic medalist, Herbert can’t yet bare to ponder a future after competition.

“I can’t fail,” he said. “I’ve made an Olympic Team in the world’s hardest sport. I graduated from Northwestern with a 3.4 GPA and have plenty of things that I can do when I’m done competing. But when I came back, I came back to reach my goals. Letting go of competition is the hardest part.”

With his alma mater dealing with the recent firing of head wrestling coach Drew Pariano, the question of whether he was interested in becoming a coach there is a viable option, as well. And although he admits that coaching is certainly in his future, it’s not at the college level… at least not at this point.



“Coaching is something I definitely want to do, but not at the college level,” he admitted. “Could that change? Sure. But I want a bigger reach. Instead of coaching about 20-30 kids I want to reach hundreds of thousands at the youth level. We’ve already started over the last three and a half years and have about 15 camps. On that front, we are growing and progressing and introducing the sport to tons of kids at a young age with our Base Wrestling camps.”

However comfortable with his future, it does little to help Herbert’s competitive itch.

And now, the dilemma over how to handle this injury.

Herbert is looking to the wrestling community for advice. With three options to deal with it— through doing rehab, getting arthroscopic surgery, or full surgery and petitioning for a wrestle-off — he wants to know what everyone else would do if they were in his position so that he can make the most informed/best decision possible.

Leave a comment or take to social media (@Jakeherbert84) to give him your input.