Our oldest son started wrestling last year.  His first season was hard. It was hard for me too.  He didn’t win a match. This season we have seen a vast improvement in him.  He’s won about half of his matches, which is pretty amazing when you think about what happened the first season.

This past weekend we attended a tournament that offered both Folkstyle and Freestyle wrestling.  If you don’t know the difference, it’s okay, they look pretty similar to me. The biggest difference is the scoring. Anyway, back to my story…

We really haven’t spent much time on Freestyle.  Folkstyle is more common—used in grade schools up through colleges.  This tournament didn’t offer a separate fee for the two styles, you could opt to do only one, but the fee was the same whether you did one or both, so of course we did both. If I have to pay, I’m getting my money’s worth.

All morning long my oldest son stressed about the Freestyle portion coming after Folkstyle was finished.  He’d never done it, so my husband took him down on an open mat and showed him how to do a few freestyle moves, one of them being the Russian roll.

Now came the big moment, his very first Freestyle match.  He took the kid down to the mat with ease. Takedowns are definitely his strength.  What happened next amazed me even more, he tried to put the Russian roll on the kid.  And it worked!—kind of.  He rolled the boy over once, but lost momentum in the middle of his second turn and ended up stuck on the bottom.  Basically, the other boy, now on top, got credit for pinning my son.  Yet, I couldn’t have been prouder. It takes guts to attempt things out of our comfort zone, and he’d done it with flare, using a move he barely knew.  That’s my boy!