Welcome Wrestlers, Parents, and Coaches, I hope many of you find this book in the early stages of your current wrestling role and can take lessons outlined here and apply them where they can help you. This book is intended for wrestling parents that either have a lot of questions with no answers, or are given too many answers for only a few questions. In both instances, things are equally frustrating. Parents of younger wrestlers may wonder things like, ‘should my child be lifting weights’, ‘should my child be losing weight’, or ‘how hard should I push them to reach their potential?’ As parents gain experience with each new season, they may find many trusted bits of advice from different experts within the sport that somewhat contradict each other. At the end of the day, the option which may be the best choice for your wrestler(s) is time-consuming at best, and stressful at worst. The best way to set a kid up for success varies; there are a lot of credible men and women who have a track record of making top tier wrestlers. However, no method of training program has a 100% success rate. It’s important to realize that the goal is long-term because too often parents and coaches alike, ignite a hatred for the sport by pushing their young wrestlers too far. This book captures common advice, lays out possible outcomes; the risks, downfalls, as well as a few, extra tidbits of advice scattered throughout. In short, I will give a pros and cons list of the most common advice my parents and I have heard as we stumbled our way through a successful wrestling career ourselves. What this book is NOT intended to do is be an instruction manual to build a good wrestler. What I DO offer here are options and the ability to make a more informed decision concerning the situations you'll face because there will be possible long-term effects to consider. Often, parents tell their son or daughter to do something that produces ‘immediate-results’ without considering whether they are setting their kid up for long-term success, or not. Too often, I witness some incredible athletes burn out and not even ‘try to wrestle’ at the next stage of their ‘scholastic-careers’. I wrote this book to redeem an array of National Champions that never were and to grow our sport, from the ‘bottom-up’. If you, the ‘Reader’, feel like you have a thought that would be beneficial for our writing team there will be an email to forward any questions, comments, or attachments that you may come to mind. Just like our sport, we hope this novel can continue to grow and we are open to the idea of adding or omitting information that will help the overall quality.
