All kinds of body types wrestle. That's the best thing about the sport: it's based on weight, so you can have "fair" competition among all shapes and sizes.

Wrestling is definitely seen as cross-training for lots of football positions from lineman to linebackers to dbacks. If you follow the in-state wrestling programs, they'll usually get a coach or two from the UofA to provide a quote to them about how great wrestling is for development of football players (lots of times it's coaches from the midwest like Bielema).

It's an awesome sport. There's something about that individual 1v1 competition on a public stage that is hard to beat. My son wrestled from when he was 5 up until COVID. He started back again in high school and was doing well, then he had a really scary staph infection that led to MRSA in his knee and a hospital stay and we bailed on it (mountain biking is his primary sport). I do feel like wrestling was pretty crucial in developing him into the competitor and athlete he is today, though.

This post was edited on 1/10/24 at 9:16 am

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Posted by beebefootballfan

Member since Mar 2011

19047 posts

Posted on 1/10/24 at 10:30 am to hogfly

Destiny Nunez of Beebe was the first Girls State Champion Wrestler in Arkansas. She was wrestling in the boys 106lb class.

Suravieve Robertson of Beebe was the first girl to win a state title wrestling against girls.

Beebe used to have a pretty stout boys program as well. Lot of state medal match qualifiers. Not sure if its still decent anymore.

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Posted by troyt37

Member since Mar 2008

13355 posts

Posted on 1/10/24 at 2:17 pm to hogfly

quote:
It's an awesome sport.

It really is. I was born in California, and lived there until was 10. When I was in 3rd grade, I followed my older brother to his JR High wrestling practice. I could wrestle, and knew I could, because of my brother.

Coach was wary about letting a 3rd grader wrestle with kids 5-7 years older than me, so he said in order to wrestle, I had to be able to do 100 pushups, 200 sit-ups, and spend 5 minutes in an arched position with my back to the mat, only my head and feet touching the mat, rolling my head touching my ear on one side to the other. I did that in about 30 minutes to his surprise, so he let me wrestle. The closest guy on the team to my weight, outweighed me by 25 pounds, which is a lot in wrestling. I pinned him in less than 3 minutes.

So here I am a 3rd grader, who would have the junior high school bus stop at the elementary school to pick me up for meets. By the 4th grade, I was placing and even won a couple of tournaments. Coaches were coming to see me wrestle, because they had heard I was wrestling with the junior high as a 4th grader and winning.

Then we move to Arkansas, and not only is there no wrestling team, there's no football team either. My school played basketball and baseball. Where I was from in California, basketball was for sissies who didn't like to get hit. So baseball was all I had.

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