Zackie Chans narrative

Zach Jones                                             

9/27/13

                              Wrestling

  

 My wrestling years started in 5^th grade. I went to the middle school practices even though I wasn’t old enough to join but they had a “little kids group” for those who were looking into wrestling when old enough. I liked it all except for the coach at that time. He was the true definition of a moron. He clearly didn’t care about the success of anyone’s wrestling year besides his sons. He had a jerkish way of saying stuff, didn’t know how to appropriately interact with younger kids or even older kids. So obviously he wasn’t a very good coach. So I took those practices until 7^th grade when I could actually be part of the middle school wrestling team. Fortunately, though the old coach had moved and was replaced with a very good and awesome coach, whose motive was not to make you pissed or be a jerk to you but to make everyone better and succeed at the sport.

    I WAS one of those kids who thought that they were tough, so I believed that I would just go and kick butt, and tear up the mats right off the bat. Man was I wrong. The only thing that I remember from my first match is getting my butt kicked and almost spewing from exhaustion. That’s when I realized that I had a long way to go to get to that kicking butt stage. So I practiced.

   I knew that I was one of the bigger kids on the team so of course I wanted and preferred to wrestle with the younger and smaller kids not realizing that I need to practice with the bigger and older kids to get any better. Finally lying on my back completely flattened after getting taken down by a 210 pound kid that year, I realized that I had been wasting my time with the younger kids.

 So the next year I really took this into consideration. I made an effort to try to wrestling with the bigger kids to try to get as good as I could. And guess what? It paid off with a 4^th place medal at districts and a chance to go to state. But I did as much as I wanted and got as far as I thought necessary in my opinion. 

  I learned many things during my seasons of wrestling. Most are lessons and virtues that are required to get through life and other sports and tasks. You can’t just go into the sport all goofy and inconsiderate. If you approach it this way then you will, like a lot of things have a bad experience and not get very good at what you are trying to perfect.  Second, I went in being all cocky and arrogant. Also like a lot of other situations in life if you go into the activity cocky and arrogant then you will never know what to do and what you need to work on. You can’t assume you know everything about anything. It’s guaranteed that there are multiple things that when asked to perform, related to a task or activity that you believe you know everything about, you will not know the first step in performing the task asked of you.

   So I learned a lot more than just how to wrestle in my years of wrestling. I learned important life virtues.