Wrestling

One perk of being a member of our church is the annual summer youth wrestling classes taught by our pastor and his son. Today I joined the proud dads and took Lukas to his first wrestling class.

Up front, I have never wrestled (properly) and never competitively. For survival, yes, but never competitively. My only expectation was that the class would be taught correctly, and that there would be some good male competition. Lukas had fewer expectations since he is only four.

There were nine boys there and one five-year-old named Ben who was Lukas' size. The boys first stretched and I was surprised to see that Lukas could join a circus as a contortionist. The boys were instructed to lie down and pull their legs to their chests. Lukas' feet went all the way over his head and touched the ground. They received instruction in the moves that they were going to practice and then took turns wrestling.

Lukas' first attempts at wrestling looked more like dancing, since he didn't try and drop his opponent to the mat, but instead held his hands and danced around in circles. Ben had wrestled last year and knew what he was doing, so Lukas got dropped by Ben the first couple of times.

After an hour and a half Lukas started to lose interest in the class, which lasted for two hours. I let him take a break playing with blocks before I put his head gear back on him and let him have one last match with Ben. This was a three minute match that was scored. Lukas did well for his first time wrestling in a match, but Ben was far superior to Lukas and won the match. It was a lot of fun to see the older boys wrestling, and to see the confidence they had. I look forward to watching Lukas, and Konrad, grow up in youth wrestling.