Collegiate Wrestlers Making A Scene At The Senior Level

We need $$$$ to train our wrestlers were going to somehow get backing from business people and rich X-wrestlers and there isn't to many of them

I think it is George W. Bush's fault! I mean, we blame him for every other darn thing that's wrong in the world.

it means our freestlye is getting weaker and our underclass kids are getting better

Really, the problem starts much earlier than any of you have stated. The problem is simply that wrestling is a 2nd, probably 3rd (maybe 4th) tier sport in the US. As a country, we don't care at all about wrestling. Think of all the best athletes at your school. Now tell me how many are wrestlers? I'm not an expert on Russian wrestling, but it seems to me that they wrestle smarter, better technically, and more efficiently than we do. Only our so called 'Freaks' can even hope to place at the Olympics. Flowrestling does some good things here, promoting the sport, but it needs to go beyond an online video site. Wrestling needs marketing, and publicity, but lets just face the facts. We are never going to get it. Most kids that don't wrestle just think that wrestling is "an excuse for guys to rub on each other". Well anyway, we need the athletes, and we need to be smarter. Easier said than done.

If you're even a little in doubt about the rules, just watch the Gavin-Schlatter semi on YouTube. 2 out of 3 periods decided by a ball grab, and both of those really decided by the ref. One take down the entire match, no mat wrestling at all, very few shots to speak of. We've all seen these guys wrestle folk style, so we know they can open up more than this. But the current rules encourage boring wrestling. It's no wonder the guys coming off a college season are doing well.

Its only less exciting to the people who refuse to look past the rules and actually watch the wrestling going on. I watched the Olympics this summer and found majority of the matches to be quite exciting. No if you're into 2-1 Nickerson vs Donahoe snore fests, by all means keep wwatching folk.

I agree the rules make it less exciting. You can't really blame certain wrestlers saying they are unexciting. If the rules were different, I'm sure most of the same wrestlers would be succeeding. They've made the rules, so that it basically comes down to 1 attempt and hopefully you score out of it. Listening to the stories that Mills, Lewis tell on Flo about match scores being 18-14...that seems to be where the rules need to be geared towards.

one of the contributing factors to these young men's success is the increasing specialization that is present in the wrestling community. more amd more young kids are training all year round exclusively to further their wrestling abilities. this practice was not as common when the older "veterans" were in their high school years. so overall the evolution of wrestling and its training has created some very prolific young wrestlers

Its money! No doubt!
I'm an insider and I will say that my buddies are not wrestling. My workout partners are not wrestling. Our best.....most entertaining, are not on the mat! Not to take anything from Paulsons and the rest, but, Wrestling is in a bad spot right now. As I was saying my partners have last names such as Kelly, Williams, Lewis .........I could go on but I think you get the point. This sport is killing itself. I don't know why "they" are holding back the footage of our most entertaining wrestlers. Not even the National Champs! The Entertaining Wrestlers! Because we are out here, and we want to compete. We love the sport! But we have to live! We have bills!.....Trust me when I say.....I was sitting with one of our most entertaining Olympic Silver Metalist this weekend at "Opens" and we both came to the same agreement. At least wrestling Payed for our School!

I definitely believe money is the main issue. If wrestling were more mainstream, then wrestlers could sign contracts with companies and make their money that way. There could even be a wrestling league on the senior level, but wrestling is unique in that it doesn't have any of these things. Having only ever seen the senior level wrestlers practicing on flowrestling, I don't know the ins and outs of their practices, but it seems to me like their is more focus on conditioning and less on drilling.
Also I don't know why our wrestlers are so dependant on single-leg shots. I believe this is a consequence of college, where single leg shots are the most successful takedown. Our wrestlers except to wrestle people with exceptional leg shots and leg defense (like themselves), but instead we come into contact with a completely different style.
Just my thoughts..

one of my hs wrestlers fights now. he makes like $1000 a fight. so very few get 250K
go to sherdog. i think thats the website. and u can see the exact payouts for each fight

Any wrestler that wants anything to do with money will stop wrestling once they graduate from college.

$7,300 a month (6 hours of training, 6 days a week) for the top olympians
$250,000 a fight (4 hours of training, 5 days a week) for the guy who loses on most MMA cards
do the math....wrestling is not for the rich....collegiate wrestlers went through college....they're intelligent. They want money. We're all just gladiators. We should own the octagon

I second that. The US wrestlers who compete at the international level don't make enough bread and shouldn't have to go through all the wear and tear on their bodies in the early off Olympic years. Hrovat was smart to go and train with the Russians, now it would be smarter if he took some time off to recuperate from his injuries and go too the wall in 2011 & 2012 for the games in the UK.

Maybe things will get better when matches aren't decided by a ball grab

year after the olympics is always down

I think the thing that hurts the most, are the rules. They need to be reset to where there are 3 periods with a accumulating score. under the current system there is no room for come backs and its confusing. Its frustrating to lose a match in the third period with a score of 1to 1 becuase the other guy scored last. Some things I think that would make Freestyle wrestling a little better are:

1. Change the 2 out of 3 rule, let the score accumulate. 10 pt tech fall.
2. put in over time. Sudden death overtime to decide tied matches, then a chance from parterre is still tied.
3. forget about the clinch. Its pretty much all up to chance at that point anyways. Put the wrestling back in the wresters hand and not the referees hands..
anyways thats what I think.

I think it's pretty simple, once out of college our senior level competitors do not have the time or resources to train full time. Unfortunately, in the end this equates to money. Could a mixed martial artists be the best in the UFC without training full time (2-3 x's a day)? Not likely, the same goes for wrestlers wanting to compete at the elite level. It's a "lifestyle", and this requires: time, money, and training.

Wrestling is a reflexive (I made this word up) sport. This means, movements do not pass through cognitive structures before they are executed. To become world class at at these movements, it takes thousands of hours, some say the exact number is 10,000 (http://www.google.com/search?q=10+000+hours+to+become+an+expert). Where I see a US disadvantage is in the margins of freestyle (out of bounds, back exposure, clinch, etc.). A US wrestler does not spend thousands of hours working on these aspects of their wrestling. Even SR (post-college) competitors spend far too little time at the nuances of freestyle, this work needs to started at the kid level and maintained - not done occasionally as cross training.

I don't advocate changing folkstyle to match freestyle. FILA goes out of its way to reduce wrestling to a game of chance and confusion with erratic rule changes. Beyond that, I pretty much agree with everyone else.

JW although i agree with you i dont think it would work. think of how many middle school/high school mainly middle school coaches dont know how to wrestle freestyle. and if they did they dont no alot they typically just no the rules and the basic moves. i think they should split the wrestling season in 3rds. track has 2 seasons of a "different" sport. they have track and cross country. so why cant we split into thirds. have a falkstyle, freestyle and greco season. or even split it in halfs and make 1/2 the season folkstyle and the other half freestyle and greco. any body agree???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I think the problem with the senior guys(myself included) is that they don't get enough matches in. You can wrestle live sessions at practice, but you can't replace a real match. There needs to be more tournaments around the US during the year, so that senior guys can wrestle more. There also needs to be more places to train spread out across the country. Right now you have NYAC, Gator, Sunkist, and some colleges that have an assistant competing. This of course stems from lack of money, and the innability to get funding for more club teams.

The biggest problem I see, per se, is that the wrestlers of Varner/Herbert/Metcalf etc. caliber, are not continuing to compete on the SR level, and thus, the better, yet less experienced wrestlers, win.
Look at each weight class:
55--> no cejudo, sammie, or abas; all ncaa champion(s), or of that caliber
60--> Za, Bunch; both great wrestlers, but not as dominant as Brands, Cross, Guerrero etc. were (those guys are all NCAA champs, Za and Bunch were not). Also no Gallick
66---> Paulson and Metcalf are both NCAA champs, Schwab 4th....this is arguably the best weight
74---> Paulson and Gavin are champs;but no Heskett, Williams, Askren, Pritzlaff, Cunningham, etc.
84-->Herbert over Luedke; Hrovat is beaten, but no Sanderson, Lawal, Pendleton, Rosholt,
96---> Varner over Cerminara; Varner is a 3 time finalist, but Cerminara I think just had 1 2nd place finish. No Cormier, Davis, Dudziak,
120---> Mocco over Dlagnev. No McCoy, Konrad, Rowlands Steve Neal,(hate to say it but) Lesnar, Thompson etc.
The problem is 4-fold: MMA, money, guys getting older (this is connected with money; guys have neither the means or desire to continue competing), and given its the year after an Olympics, guys have not made a name for themselves yet. I recall being a fairly new wrestler and seeing the 06 team (Henson, lil and big Zad***, Pritz, Hrovat, Cormier, Tolly), thinking it was a geezer, 4 jokes, and 2 guys who were decent. Of course, the geezer was a previous world champ who got a bronze, 3 of the 'jokes' got gold, silver, bronze, and made an olympic team, and the two guys I thought would do well didn't end up placing. Just give whatever team comes out of '09 a chance, they very well could surprise people and grab a pile of medals.

What a lot of people dont understand is college kids go through the long grind of a college season and that takes a lot out of you. College coaches use you up for what your worth, and they get everything possible out of you. Your body starts to break down after a while and people dont feel like cutting the weight when you've been doing it for so long. The russians, or the foreigners for that matter have been wrestling international wrestling(freestyle and greco) and they dont have to make weight every single weekend and sometimes during the week like us americans do starting in elementary school all the way up through the high school and college levels. I dont think they even know what a 2 or 3day weigh in is either. Its hard to want to keep training while raising a family and having a full time job on top of cutting weight and keeping your body healthy and finding time to train. There arent a lot of incentives for americans after they spend sometimes 5 or 6 years in college. They need money to start paying off student loans and those types of things. Another thing is our training is a lot more intense. We do rely more on our conditioning and what some people call "hard training". We are more intense. If you watch an international practice, its much more relaxed. The techinques are a lot different. It allows the foreigners to compete into their 30's while americans are considered "old and washed up" when they are in their 30s

i think your slighting other wrestlers abilities just because stiebert is an amazing wrestler

We ARE AMERICANS. The best the brightest in the world. Its a shame the government doesnt provide enough financial backing for the Olympic games. Our college wrestlers lose a long term connection to our beloved sport
finding themselves at a dead end competitively due to in many cases, a support line. Usually most of these wrestlers at heart, give back as a mentour of some sort. I believe that the only thing holding the sport back on an olympic level is funding. BUT going back to being the best and the brightest in the world, It should be our expectation to achieve greatness. not only in folkstyle, but also freestyle and greco or as i like to call them, worldstyle.we should strive to be the best at all levels. a great wrestler knows that to be a top notch champ, you need to train all year round. Thats what it takes. its a lifestyle.

Joe, looking at the way our senior level athletes train in the videos Flo has posted of them, it doesn't surprise me that a kid like Herbert who literally puts all of his time into wrestling and works hard at it, is beating these dudes. I wasn't impressed by Stephen Abas's preparation for the Olympic Team Trials last year and I wasn't impressed by the live sessions you guys filmed of the Olympic Wrestlers preparing for the games. They appeared to be low intensity and low on conditioning. You will notice that guys that put the extra time in like Cejudo and Mocco, who spent extra time training after every practice with Brands are doing much better than the others. In addition, I noticed that many of these younger dudes have more open styles. Old dudes like Bono and Schwab just sit there, doing nothing and then get shot on.

One of the big problems older wrestlers face is the lack of funding. In Russia, where good wrestlers are financially treated like professional boxers in the U.S., wrestlers can afford to train every single day for several hours. In the U.S., a good wrestler might only train hard during a one month camp in preparation for a tournament, and that needs to change. When you compare this with the young bucks that are in the room everyday for several hours working EXTREMELY hard, it just doesn't match up.
Maybe what these older guys need to do is just practice all season with a collegiate team AND GO THROUGH THE WHOLE PRACTICE. Take for example Doug Schwab. I don't know a whole lot about the guy, but seeing him in that Iowa practice video gives me the impression that Schwab wrestles live with Metcalf but doesn't condition with the team. I don't know, it's just a thought, but don't you think that since he is competing in the international scene he should be conditioning with the team too? I know folkstyle differs from freestyle, but these older wrestlers will definitely be in better shape than the Daniel Cormiers, Joe Williams, Andy Hrovats and Chris Bonos that we see out there on the mat if they condition with the teams they coach. In all seriousness, guys with as much body fat as Cormier and Hrovat should not be competing unless they lose some weight and drop a couple weight classes.
So to sum this up:
The two things I think these older dudes need to do is:
1. Open up
2. PRACTICE HARD
Just one more thing. I think U.S. wrestlers need to get out of the shoot-sprawl mentality. You will notice that the Russians score many takedowns without even shooting at all, using moves like a two-on-one to a drag or a simple pass-by or even just yanking the guy to the side so they can spin around. All of these moves are done from a tie-up and the Russians dominate the tie-up and are much better at handfighting than the Americans. Our guys need to research the alternate ways to score from the tie-up other than their basic set-up to a shot. Also, you will notice that the Russians continue to wrestle if their sprawl fails, and resort to moves like the crotch lift to try to score back points. I think American wrestlers need to look into these moves and develop them at the level of the Russians.

i mean those guys are so talented but the senior level guys should be winning. It really is like a job to them. They have unlimited resources and training partners and time. They have maturity.. Idk I cant really see how they have any excuse to lose to a college/h.s. kid.

Joe, I see your point but I don't think you should discount the individual drive and determination of our college or High School guys. I think condition can be a factor but one's individual desire to be a champion can be in a seasoned guy or a college guy or even the Junior in HS. I don't know if the change over from college to freestyle is that big of a deal to the more talented and mentally focused wrestler. Thanks for the post, good point to discuss.

I think it shows that our older wrestlers just aren't training the way they should be. This isn't a diss on those guys, but if they were allowed to train everyday, like the other countries do, these young bucks wouldn't be winning all the time.

I think I should take you job as your not doing it very well.

My 2-cents is that the guys that won are just flat out that good. Herbert, Varner, Metcalf, etc. are doing all the right things. It shows that the college programs and clubs are doing the right things. Plus factor in that many of the recent past "stars" did not compete or are just getting a little past their prime.

Abolish folkstyle wrestling in the US on all levels. Period.

i dont think the change from folk to free is that big. at least with me it only takes about 2 weeks maybe 5 practices fro me to be in "freestyle mode". but the conditioning part is a great help but i donbt think it should be a factor. if your wrestling in the us open you should be in the best shape of your life so just because you finished a season all though it helps alot i dont think its that majopr of a factor especially to a freestyle wrestler who really works hard. how could you expect to do well in the open if your not in shape