This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Wrestling: Off Season Football Practice

As our Raiders football players put away their equipment for the off-season (congratulations, by the way, to our champion 6th graders, and 7th grade League runners-up), and as the WMC team pursues another group championship, many football players are considering their off-season workout programs.  I came across an article published a few years ago in Ohio that might be worth the time for our football players to read.  The link the information was taken from is:

http://www.news-herald.com/general-news/20090111/pigskin-pins-wrestling-is-a-football-players-best-o...
=====

The Columbus Dispatch published a story on the correlation between football and wrestling in 2007. Both Ohio State offensive coordinator Jim Bollman and co-defensive coordinator Luke Fickell touched on the subject of how wrestling relates to football players.

"The quickness and strength of their hands inside is becoming a much bigger part of the football game nowadays," Bollman said in The Dispatch. "And I think that (wrestlers) have a little bit of a head start."

Find out what's happening in Long Valleywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"We talk about competitiveness, and I don't think there is a better sport to look at someone's competitiveness than wrestling," Fickell said in The Dispatch. "You can tell it's something that's one-on-one competitive, and that's what we're trying to look for. ... You can't define it. You don't know what somebody has got inside their chest and their heart, but if you know they've been one-on-one and they've got that competitive nature ..."

Fickell is one of countless big-time Division I football recruits who had stellar wrestling careers. The 1979 state heavyweight bout between St. Joseph's Bob Golic and St. Edward's Tom Cousineau is legendary to this day, with Golic taking the Notre Dame route to the NFL and Cousineau going through Ohio State to the NFL.

Find out what's happening in Long Valleywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Rich Frimmel, an administrator in the Riverside School District, had some classic battles with Mentor's Paul Long on the wrestling mat, also.

Said former Ohio State defensive lineman Frimmel, a heavyweight state champion at North Olmsted before playing football for OSU, "I don't know if they still do it, but Woody (Hayes) and Earle (Bruce) used to save a scholarship for the Division I state heavyweight champion."

Weighing the options

There are a few options for football players in the months following the completion of their season -- offseason weightlifting programs, basketball, hockey, swimming, wrestling ...

Or doing nothing.

Granted, not all football players enjoy basketball, swimming, hockey or wrestling.

"Any time a kid has a chance to compete, I think that's the best thing to do," Mentor football coach Steve Trivisonno said. "I wrestled. I wasn't very good at it, but I wrestled."

Marino contends of all the options, wrestling offers the best workout and training for football players.

"Football kids lift three days a week for an hour or so and do agility drills like running around cones or hopping dots," he said. "But weights, dots, ladders and cones don't hit back. When I was in college, we had a term for all the agility stuff -- it was called step aerobics."

Ledgemont coach Cliff Radie lauded the support his program has received from former football coach Shane Blanford and current coach Todd Klugh. The Redskins have had a pair of Division VI playoff teams in the past five years, with many of those players benefitting from the wrestling program.

"I feel 100 percent if a football player is not playing a winter sport, they should wrestle to further develop their athletic skills," Radie said. "I feel all football coaches should stress their players' participation in wrestling in the winter if they have not already developed basketball skills or history.

"I had experience with one football colleague who believed that a winter in the weight room was always better than wrestling. His teams never experienced their full potential or had great success."

 




We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?