Lessons from the mat

By Allison Gorman
Photo by Jenn E. Clark

Wrestling requires strength. And it takes a special kind of strength to go one-on-one in front of a crowd, lose the contest, and then stand up, shake hands with your opponent—and leave it all on the mat.

It’s that sense of civility that distinguishes the sport, says Ooltewah High School head wrestling coach Wendell Weathers. Learning to lose with grace is a prerequisite for high school wrestling, he says, and it teaches self-discipline just when boys need it most. “Especially early in your career, you automatically feel like the spotlight’s on you, and you need to be able to react in a certain way because you lost, you’re a young man, and, in your mind, your manhood’s been challenged a little bit . . . ,” he says. “You can’t shift the blame or hide in a crowd and release some of that feeling. But that’s one of those character things: You don’t accept loss, but you handle loss in a proper way, and then you go back and practice and work and improve yourself.”

The son of Red Bank football coaching legend Tom Weathers, Wendell Weathers was a wrestler himself, first at Red Bank and then briefly as a walk-on at UTC, before he joined the Air Force. He’d been away from the sport for years before a new teaching career in Rhea County came with the opportunity to coach as well. Two years later he was offered a position at Ooltewah, and for the eight years since he has led an Owls team that seems to get stronger every year. (Last year the team was second in the state in AAA.)

What Coach Weathers has found over the years, he says, is that while the sport continues to change, kids haven’t. Despite evolving techniques, wrestling still works its same magic, turning boys into men.

What’s involved in a typical practice?

Probably a third of our practice is drilling. We treat first practice as if everybody’s a brand-new wrestler, but it’ll get pretty accelerated, and it’s a lot of information to process. We tell our wrestlers, don’t get frustrated, because you’ll get bits and pieces, and as the season goes, it comes together. And it does, for every one of them that sticks through with it.

I really credit a lot of our success—our kids are strong, their endurance levels are extremely high—to Richard Henderson, who offers weight training to individuals in different sports. They work hard. And that frees up our practice a lot; we don’t have to start practice off with 20 minutes of lifting like most other programs do, because Henderson does it for us.

How do you talk to parents about setting weight goals for wrestlers?

We tell them we want the wrestler wrestling at their weight. That’s our ideal situation. Sometimes you’ll have a couple of wrestlers that will fall in the same weight class, and if they want to separate, maybe one might go up or one might go down a weight class. Weight class is so tight—they’re usually 5 to 7 pounds of difference in average—that that’s less than 5 percent to have to drop down in weight class. We don’t encourage anything more than that.

With the weight loss, though, comes a vast amount of education on nutrition. So we start an education program for the kids and the parents about how they can naturally lose weight and actually feel better and have more energy, and a lot of times lose weight and eat more. . . . I tell kids, “You’re about to buy yourselves about 10 years added to your life, because you’ll end up developing a taste for foods that you didn’t think you liked, and that’s going to be a lifelong habit of something you started through sports.”

When you’re putting together a team, is there a certain personality you like to see?

Yes, absolutely. It doesn’t matter about their ability level. We want a kid who first of all respects himself—that means respecting his family, his school and his community—and we’ll want them coming in excited about the possibility. We want them having those heroic dreams; that’s why they’re out there in the first place. We want them to be there on time every day . . . and we want them to display sportsmanship in all areas, even beyond the arena of competition.

As a teacher, do you ever see a kid you think would be a good candidate for wrestling and try to talk him into it?

We recruit out of our hallways all the time, especially the young guys. It’s not easy; I think it’s the hardest sport to participate in. But it’s the easiest one to get into. You can’t just come in at the high school level and play baseball, because you’re competing with guys who’ve done it all their lives. The beautiful thing about wrestling is kids will start off in high school sometimes and they’ll wrestle another kid who’s brand-new at a JV tournament, but still it takes a few years to be able to develop the skills to master the techniques. So I spend a lot of time eyeballing those freshmen.

A lot of kids start wrestling as young as kindergarten. Is it an advantage to start wrestling that early?

I think for an overall program . . . you have to have a kids’ club to (have enough for a good team later). But for an individual wrestler, I think sometimes a 6th- or 7th-grader coming in is almost better than taking that very young person who . . . developed some bad habits in their elementary school years, because then you’re having to coach them out of those bad habits.

There is something sort of fundamentally humbling about the way you lose a wrestling match. How do you coach the psychological part of that?

First of all we tell the kids, 100 percent of all the matches have a winner and a loser. People are used to that. They’ll start looking at you only if you act out after you get beat. And I always tell our young guys, when you wrestle a close match and you’re new, even if you don’t win, that’s a win, because you competed. You were able to stay in the fight and battle, and that something to take home with a lot of pride.

Southeast Tennessee is a tough part of the state for wrestling. Is that an advantage or disadvantage?

During the season the competition makes us all better, and so when we get to the state level, we’re not as shell-shocked as some other teams might be. The disadvantage is we have a lot of great wrestlers not allowed to go on to the state tournament because we’re only taking the top three in our region, where other regions have the top three but there’s considerable drop-off between number one and number two and number two and number three. So we have a lot of guys not able to go to the state tournament who are way better than (state-level wrestlers from) other regions.

TSSAA does list weight classifications for female wrestlers. Have you ever coached a girl wrestler?

We’ve had two girls in the eight years since I’ve been here, and they both managed real well . . . . When you’ve got close proximity it can get a little bit—our guys have done extremely well in situations like that, but probably the reason why is because the two girls that we’ve had wrestle are probably the most mature people I’ve ever seen in my life. They were hard, hard workers, and if our guys didn’t measure up to a certain level of work, they were the ones out getting them going. Neither one of them wrestled varsity; they just didn’t have the horsepower. But they sure did have the technique.