The last thing I expected to do during my time at Wayland High School was join the wrestling team. If you told freshman year Reva, or even sophomore year Reva, that she would join a team where she would be the only girl, where she didn’t really know anyone, that girl would have laughed in your face. Yet, a few hours before registration closed for the wrestling season, I found myself staring at the Family ID wrestling page, my heart pounding as I entered in all of my information. My mouse hovered over the “submit” button for a good 20 minutes, and after I officially signed up, I slammed my computer shut, chucked it across my bed and screamed into my pillow. What was I thinking?
That’s still a question I ask myself four months later. What was I thinking? However, it’s not in a regretful way, but perhaps a more humorous reflection on how one impulsive decision in late November – the decision to join the team – might have changed my life. Of course, joining the team wasn’t entirely impulsive. There were two main reasons – or two “problems” in my life – that prompted me to join.
The first reason I joined was for my jiu-jitsu. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a popular grappling art that traces its origins back to Japan, but has grown in Brazil, and is now popular across the world. I first started my jiu-jitsu training when I was seven years old, and after nine years of training, some bruises, broken noses and tournaments, I got my black belt. However, my training was starting to plateau. If I was going to survive at the black belt level, I needed to give myself an edge, so I bid the dojo a temporary farewell and set off to add some wrestling technique to my toolbox. I knew that having some wrestling knowledge would greatly improve my jiu-jitsu, and now that the season is over and I am back to training in the dojo, I can already see the difference it has made.
The second reason I joined the team was because of health. More specifically, in the midst of constantly worrying about a family member’s health, I wanted an extremely direct way to control my fitness in order to prevent my own health from ever becoming a burden. And nothing gets you more in shape than some good ol’ Wayland Wrestling conditioning. I’ll spare you the details on this one, but I needed to regain something I had lost in my life.
On the first day of practice, I scanned the room to see if there were any other girls on the team, but there were none. I told myself that it was okay, that I knew this was coming and that it wasn’t a big deal. I could deal with boys. And I did. It wasn’t a bad thing. The harder part was dealing with no girls. I deeply missed the sisterhood I had with my female teammates back at the dojo. There is something immensely special about the bond we had built over the years, and its sudden absence almost terrified me. However, I started to attend some all-girls practices at a nearby wrestling club, and that introduced me to so many talented, hardworking female wrestlers who I admired and could relate to. That’s the thing about starting something new, you just have to find your crowd and hunker down. That’s something I didn’t realize until well into the season, but I am so grateful I did.
I also didn’t anticipate the massive learning curve I would have to undertake. I thought that my jiu-jitsu experience would help me in wrestling, but boy, was I wrong. Though the two martial arts are similar in several ways, the fact that wrestling is about pinning your opponent, while jiu-jitsu is about submitting your opponent, makes the two fundamentally different. During the early days of the season, I’d find myself going to my back (a big no in wrestling) and trying to pull guard (yikes!).
Additionally, I realized that my physical strength could use some real strengthening (hah). People I grappled in jiu-jitsu were typically stronger than me, but I could compensate for larger discrepancies in strength with techniques that helped me secure submissions, even when I didn’t have a positional advantage. This means that in jiu-jitsu, I could win with my back on the ground, but the same doesn’t apply to wrestling. In an activity that is revolved around pinning your opponent to the ground, I struggled. That’s an understatement.
As the season went on, I continued to face obstacles. The biggest was the mental battle I faced, much of which was self-inflicted. After especially hard practices, I’d return to the empty locker room, wash my hands, splash some cold water on my face and just stare at myself in the mirror. In those moments, I couldn’t believe that I was real. What was I thinking, doing this? But, no matter what I said in moments of anger, I truly never regretted joining the team. The soreness in my muscles and the adrenaline was just addicting. It was like discovering jiu-jitsu all over again. I felt all these emotions: pride, anger, frustration, determination and so much more. It didn’t matter what emotion I was feeling, I had never felt more alive in my life.
And maybe that is what I needed. Not to be pessimistic or depressing, but there is something tragically monotonous about our exhausting school lives. Sure, I picked my battles: hard classes, an array of extracurricular activities, a job and sports. But, it didn’t matter what I packed my schedule with, because my high school life was becoming increasingly mundane. I had lost my direction. I had a big goal – college – but that was far off on the horizon, and I didn’t have anything to orient me in my day-to-day life. Joining the wrestling team changed that.
And so now, I will bestow on you my wisdom from what I have learned. I thought that my junior year in high school would be the most brutal, laborious and exhausting year of my life. I wasn’t necessarily wrong. But, I reached a point where I was craving something for myself, and maybe you are, too. Maybe you’re sitting at your desk in the middle of the night for the hundredth time, staring at a mountain of schoolwork, wishing for more control over your life. You want to be reborn.
I think that’s what really drew me to wrestling. It was a mountain to scale and I had nowhere to go but up. It was a challenge unlike any other, it was change, but most importantly, it was control. I was choosing to empower myself in a way that frankly no class, no club or anything else could have achieved. I encourage you to do the same. There might be aspects of your life that you can’t control, there might be things you just have to do, but there are also things that give you a choice. There are opportunities for you to decide who you want to be. Take those opportunities. Make decisions for yourself. Find a way to feel alive, to feel like you’re becoming stronger, to know where you’re going and what you’re working towards.