An open letter to Northern State University, the City of Aberdeen, the SDWCA and the South Dakota Wrestling Community

There are no selection show Sundays. There are no office pools on Cody Pack's chances at the Championships. Wrestling is difficult arduous sport from the time you pick up a headgear to the day you hang it up. There is little glory. Stands are usually empty with just the cheering of families and a few friends. Lessons are learned with your face in the mat or counting the lights. I often found the center of the mat was the greatest solitude I could find. The quiet muffle of the crowd making it through my headgear to my ears. A zen quality of thinking of your next two or three moves and the simultaneous reaction of the body putting those into action while processing what an opponent is currently doing. The delirious feeling of giving it your all, and sometimes your arm not being raised despite all your effort. It is living in the moment while thinking of the future and forgetting the past.

In recent years, the sport has taken a bashing, sometimes even by me. It has gotten better in aspects that shouldn't be part of the sport but have been integral to it's past and the old school ways of thinking concerning nutrition. It has fought it's way back from extinction from an Olympic Committee that would rather put more obscure sports in action than a rich history of tradition.
In our own microcosm of the world the wrestling community has been setback by the recent decision of Northern State University to halt the program for "study". I don't believe anyone is buying that. However, the quick reaction for consideration of the SDWCA is to cancel the State Youth Tournament in Aberdeen, SD next year. The tournament was a request by the NSU wrestling to have as a fundraiser for it's scholarships. Think about that! A university reached out to a youth program in order to save it's program. Smartly(can't remember if that's a word, but I wrestled.), the SDWCA agreed to do that in order to protect the sport it nurtures in youth across our State. What a great idea! Unfortunately the unfortunate happened, the NSU program was put on the chopping block. At least it got a courtesy excuse, unlike University of Nebraska-Omaha which was just summarily executed alongside it's football program. UNO had a very successful program, so the NSU excuse of 2 bad years doesn't hold much weight with me either.

Now, I have laid the ground work of the problem. I can see why the SDWCA is thinking about the decision to remove the tournament from Aberdeen. On the surface this looks like a reasonable request. However, wrestlers and their communities are tougher than that. We can not simply take our headgears and go home when things get tough. If the University is serious about a "courtesy study" then a committee of concerned wrestling parties should be formed. Frame the beliefs that wrestling deserves to be part of the University still. A solution should be found. If this wrestling team is that important then we should be looking to help still run this tournament in Aberdeen and as a complete community raise funds to help with scholarships to maintain the continuation of the program. Not just NSU, but all the colleges in the state maintain a program. I do not know where all the funds go for all the clubs, but combined we should be able to create some sort of scholarships for our South Dakota Wrestlers to attend university in pursuit of knowledge and to compete. This could help us retain the best of our wrestling talent instead of them leaving the state to represent other colleges. Should the tournament be held in Aberdeen and NSU fails to reinstate the program then funds raised should be disseminated in a fashion that benefits the sport as a whole in the state.

Facebook posts and petitions are nice, but funding is funding. Coaches in every sport and at all levels of education know this to be true. To protect this sport that so many of us grew up. Now we are passing on to our children, because we know it to be one of the purest sports out there. No ball, no pads, we all weigh the same(in theory anyways), just skill, desire, determination and work. We must truly combine the talents we all forged through wrestling and have taken into our adult lives and come up with a better solution than "let's just move the tournament". NSU may be the first shot fired, there are more Universities and more programs at stake. If we retreat in the face of this adversity, then every college knows that we are not just measuring our support with the number of facebook likes and twitter reposts. True support is measured in dollars whether through funding or butts in the seats. A hard truth, brutal but true. Wrestling is very much like life, you reap what you sow. The wrestling community cannot afford to let another program shutdown with barely a fight. Simply moving the tournament is barely a fight and will sow the thought process that this is alright. Supporting the sport needs to happen with calm, reason, and  viable solutions.

(I decided to use this blog for an editorial opinion piece, which is really not it's purpose per se. It is to work on my writing ability, so I kind of hit the objective. Also, I'm not a narcissist so I can't always write about myself. )

Life is full of coincidences. We all have them, some insignificant and some seemingly meaningful. These events are just occurrences to which we add our own stories. Still, what is life without a good story now and then? Pretty boring. We often look to our past to for signs of what we should do in the now. As long as we don't dwell on it and allow ourselves to move forward there is nothing wrong with that.
This last week my little girl turned 9 years old. It's pretty incredible to think in reality it was so long ago. Yet it seemed like yesterday. I realize this is cliché and everyone with kids says the same thing. There is a reason for that. It's true, these years fly by. The birth of any child is so embellished in your mind that it is so easy to pull up that memory because of it's intensity. So, yes, it seems like yesterday.
About 6 months prior to the birth of my daughter my dad passed away, and my grandmother passed away 3 months after him. It was a tough time to say the least. Stories are always thrown out between relatives at times like this where we remember some of the smart or dumb things the deceased did. My Dad was nowhere near immune to these types of stories. Dad had a workshop in my hometown, he was pretty good at fixing things, working on cars, etc.. It was full of part time projects he would work on after his day at the plant or on the weekends. His mechanical intuitiveness was always something I marveled at. His workshop was full of all the tools kids aren't supposed to touch today. Band saws, table saws, welding equipment, cutting tools, you name it. My brothers and I would screw around and try to play tag with welding masks on, inside this shop with all the machinery. Real safe stuff like that. Mostly, we wanted to learn how to use the equipment and maybe get to do something cool. I was 4 or 5 years old. I didn't get to do anything that required metal revolving teeth and electricity.
We also stored things inside the shop. In particular we had a bin of mostly sports equipment and some toys. It was full of bats, rackets,  and various balls. I think we kept it there so we would have some other things to do outside the shop when we were hanging out and getting under foot.
Now, as most people know Dad had a pretty good drinking problem and more than once I'm sure he drank beer(I believe it was the 70's so Olympia or PBR was the brand of choice at the time) while working at his shop. In one very good instance he was painting something yellow. Well, he either overshot his target or aimed on purpose, he was known to do stuff like that in his alcohol driven jerkiness. Long story short, he painted the bin full of our toys. The end result was a bunch of sporting equipment painted half yellow. The other half was facing down or away from the spray and retained their original colors. We held on to many of these items for years, and always produced the story when asked why our tennis racket was half yellow. We thought it was funny after a while (That's called a coping mechanism)
Now we shoot back up to nine years ago and my daughter was being born. It hurt like hell that Dad would never see his granddaughter. Despite all of our differences and arguments, I loved him very much, even in his various states of being towards the end of his life. So, even in that joyous time, there was some sadness leading up to Lilly's birth for me. I won't bore you with the details of her actual birth. A few highlights: it was a back-birth, forceps were used, at one point my wife caught me watching Seinfeld (The English Patient episode), Apollo Ohno won another gold(USA! USA! USA!)and we had one of the best old school nurses to ever walk the halls of Sioux Valley Hospital(Karen you will always be a legend and will be missed! She always remembered Lilly whenever we saw her after that!) It all ended around 3ish in the morning, and we had acquired our beautiful baby girl.

The next morning I walked down to get a coffee from the stand in the cafeteria. I ordered the usual mocha, grabbed a newspaper and handed the lady my ten and waited for my change. She handed me whatever the change was and as I was about to put it in my pocket, I glanced down in my palm. Nestled among the coins was a dime, it was half yellow  and the other side was the normal silver. I don't believe in much as far as a higher entity, but I took this as a good sign of things to come and maybe the old man had seen his grand daughter arrive in this world. Maybe....maybe not. I don't know if there is some sort of oxidization or science to explain why one half of the dime was yellow and the other was normal. I just know this is the only time I had ever seen, or have seen a dime like this. In reality as long as it means something to me, that is all that matters.I've held on to that dime for all these years. I never put it anywhere safe. It never gets spent. It has made it through 3 moves, including this last one as I'll explain in a minute. I let the dime have it's own journey just like the rest of us, and it always shows up so it won't be left behind.

Close to Now: Lilly just turned 9 last Thursday(as I have already mentioned). On Saturday I went back to Chamberlain to move some more of our stuff in a u-haul. As I was cleaning up and getting ready to leave I looked down on the floor of our bedroom and that half yellow dime was sitting there near a corner. I scooped it up and put it in my pocket. The drive from Chamberlain to Sioux Falls is a long one, if you've ever made it you know what I am talking about. It's a road that stretches as far as you allow your mind to let it, an endless landscape of snow, dirt and brown dead prairie. It was a nice time for reflecting on the coincidences of spray painted toys, the loss of my Dad, the birth of my daughter, growing up in South Dakota and the people(and things) I shared that journey with at the time and where I am going. I'd say that's worth a dime.