The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Coaches brace for next season full of changes
If there is a high school wrestling season this winter, it’s almost guaranteed to be unlike any other.
If there is a high school wrestling season this winter, it’s almost a guarantee it’ll be like no season before it.
Could there be a chance wrestlers will have to wear some kind of protective device on their face during matches? It’s probable the prematch and postmatch handshakes will become a thing of the past.
And it’s almost a guarantee there will be some massive change in how practice rooms and matches are sanitized.
That’s probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Under the state’s announcement that schools can move into Phase 2 of practices, wrestling teams across the state are allowed to officially begin weightlifting and conditioning as a team — with distancing restrictions — but aren’t allowed to resume official wrestling practice.
This time away has given area coaches plenty time to brainstorm what their wrestling rooms will look like once they’re allowed back in.
They, like everyone else, still aren’t quite sure what it’ll look like.
“I still think we’re in a bit of a holding pattern,” Olmsted Falls coach Bryce Burkhard said.
“We’re still on hold right now waiting, hopefully Phase 3 lets us figure out what we can do. I have a bunch of plans, one of which is dividing the kids up into groups of three or four and having them practice together, which could be easy because of weight classes. I’ve got a lot of different plans in mind, so whenever I get the green light.”
For Columbia wrestling coach Dan Juliani, having to accommodate social distancing guidelines could mean the creation of a second wrestling room. Normally, Juliani and the Raiders share their wrestling room with Columbia’s middle school team, which meant at any given time there could be as many as 30 wrestlers practicing together, something that doesn’t exactly fit into today’s social distancing guidelines.
“We’re trying to figure out the logistics of how we can maintain social distancing,” Juliani said.
“Obviously once the season starts, we’re going to have to look at setting up a separate practice room in the middle school for the middle school kids.”
Another idea coaches are toying with is the idea of staggering practice times, something some fall sport coaches have been doing.
“We’re going to be starting our practices with really small numbers,” Keystone coach Chris Vondruska said. “Maybe our practices start out with just two people, and the people wrestling together are only in contact with each other. I could just have 30-minute practices where two people get after it and get really efficient and then two more people come in and we go from there. That may be the way to start.”
Once wrestlers get back to wrestling, however, there’s not much that could conceivably change in a sport where the main goal is to pin your opponent on the mat. The biggest changes that could be made could end up being cosmetic, with some hypotheticals being wrestlers wearing masks and/or wearing additional clothing to prevent the amount of visible skin.
Even those changes could bring about their own problems.
“Kids sometimes wear full sleeves or pants when they practice anyway, so that’s not an issue,” Juliani said. “Masks I don’t see happening just because when you get in a scramble you could easily lose the mask. I think it would be very difficult to wear a mask in wrestling since we teach the kids to breathe through your nose and out through your mouth, and that would be tough to do with a mask on.”
The impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic is being felt across all levels of wrestling, not just high school. From the cancellation of the annual Junior and Cadet National championships in Fargo, N.D. to the cancellation or postponement of college wrestling camps, coaches and wrestlers at all levels are having to adjust to today’s new sports landscape.
“We would have been doing freestyle wrestling all spring and summer and would have gotten together a few times a week to work on that,” Burkhard said. “We also were planning on going to Virginia Tech in July for a team camp, so we would have gotten together the week before that to get together for workouts to get back into wrestling shape.
“The camp hasn’t been canceled officially, but I’d say there’s probably a 5% chance of that going on unless they move the date.”
While coaches and wrestlers are doing everything in their power to make sure they’re staying in shape through conditioning, the lack of opportunities to wrestle competitively over the summer could potentially lead to some teams starting this year slower compared to in the past.
“I think there could be some slower starts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you see some teams lay off of some of the harder tournaments early in the season because they’re not going to be in the shape they’re normally in,” Juliani said. “I don’t know if that’s going to impact the numbers at (the Walsh Jesuit Iron Man Tournament) or anything like that. I think it’ll depend on how things go in the fall since a lot of wrestlers are fall athletes, too.”
There’s also a chance high school wrestling, like seemingly every other sport in the country, could be held without fans. While not having fans might not have as large of impact as it would in a sport such as football, it still would be an adjustment for wrestlers and coaches.
“We have one dual meet a year and we promote the heck out of it, and I think the home-field advantage is a thing in wrestling,” Vondruska said. “Last year we competed in two ‘dual in the school’ events away at Normandy and Brunswick, and those meets are the ideal home-field advantage in wrestling. So, this year we have two scheduled at home with Normandy and Brunswick. and if we weren’t able to host those it’d be a huge disappointment since I’ve been looking forward to those since we got the away meets scheduled last year.”
While there are still some serious questions that need to be answered in order to have a wrestling season, Vondruska is cautiously optimistic there will be high school wrestling this winter.
“It’s a good thing that we’re a winter sport and that we have a little bit more time to work with,” Vondruska said. “We could even push the start of the season back to January. We’ve got about six months to figure this out.”