Foul Territory

My blogging universe has just expanded by one. I found myself often wanting to post on sports topics, but fearing it wouldn't be that interesting to most of the regular readers of The Life and Times of Andy Vogel. As such, I've created Foul Territory to allow me to go on endlessly about sports for mostly my own enjoyment. Thankfully, I'm not trying to make a living by blogging, since those sorts of bloggers can identify with this statement from Steven Goldman, "I had writer's block once. It was the worst 20 minutes of my life." Reading that made me think I'm not cut out to be a full time writer, but I do want to have the chance to talk about whatever sports news has caught my fancy that day. I will be reposting any of my sports topics from my regular blog here, backdated to the actual day of posting, so feel free to look back and see what I've already done while you wait for new posts.

High school wrestling, as with any high school sport, has vastly different extremes of coaching competence. It's hard to see as a high school student since you only see your own coach up close, but it definitely shows up in college when athletes from different backgrounds all get together on the college team. Sometimes, even a very successful wrestler has trouble adjusting to college because he won a lot of matches on talent and athletic ability. Other guys like me had a good amount of talent and athletic ability, but not enough to win with, so we either lost to the great athletes or learned how to wrestle smarter and more precisely.

In light of this, I count myself fortunate that I received such excellent coaching as a high school student. Three people get a lot of the credit for this. First, Don Horning, two time NCAA Division I All-American for Kent State. He's responsible for way more Ohio state champions than any one man reasonably should be, and he taught me a lot about winning, and a lot of my wrestling style developed as a result of being with him. Second is Joe Boardwine, currently of the NHSCA. He came into the picture my senior year of high school fresh out of college himself. Wrestling with him all year and learning from his recent college experience helped me from then until I hung up my shoes two springs ago. Lastly, there was the guy who kept me seeing Don on Sundays my senior year and drove me all over Ohio to wrestle. That's my Dad.

I mention all of this to talk about how talent only takes you so far in college. Some go farther than others, but at the highest levels, everyone has talent, and everyone is athletic, so you have to be smart in order to win the match. I think I see some of this when I watch college wrestling now with a different perspepctive. I see guys with more talent than I had, but I know that I made fewer mistakes when I was at the same place in my competitive life. It's coaching (well, mostly, there's a mental aspect to it as well) that makes the difference, and there isn't enough of it to go around, unfortunately.

Jay Jaffe has a website called Futility Infielder and there is a blog associated with it in which I posted a comment. This comment spurred Jay onto approaching the subject I commented on in greater detail in a post/article today. You can see it (and his reference to me) on his website here.

Hurray for the internet!

I took in my first wrestling match of the season on Saturday. NC State hosted a bunch of dual meets. The best team there turned out to be North Dakota State University, as they were able to take out the hosts along with Appalachian State and Duke. The Wolfpack did manage defeat an overmatched Anderson College squad as well as Gardner-Webb.

It was good to get the chance to see some wrestling after so long just going to practice. I had seen the results of the NCSU matches on the internet, but it's just not the real thing. To be honest, they didn't look that good. They totally outclassed Anderson, but some of the matches were too close, and the sharpness wasn't there. It was the first match back after a layoff, so I can chalk it up to rust, since I haven't seen them in action much this year. Hopefully, they'll get it all together and wrestle better this weekend, since they're taking on the highly ranked Fighting Illini from the University of Illinois. I don't imagine they'll win the match, but I think they can take a few from the home team.

Additionally, I got the chance to have a long talk with Clar Anderson, the coach at Duke. I first met Clar when he recruited me to wrestle at Duke way back in the good old days of 1998-1999. I then went with some of his team on a two week trip to Russia in May of 2000. That was a trip, from beginning to end. Ask me about it some time. I hadn't seen him since that trip until this past weekend. We talked about Duke and stuff going on in our lives. He told me about the criminally low budget for wrestling at Duke, let alone the complete lack of scholarships. Just put it this way, Coach K's salary is over six times the entire wrestling budget. No wrestling scholarships and less assistant coach money than Messiah at a school with an endowment over $2.6 billion. If anyone can explain this to me, I'd love to hear it. Anyhow, it was good to see Clar, and he invited me to come wrestle with his guys any time, which is nice. So at least I got that going for me.