Meet Coach Oberlin

Wrestling, in my experience, is one of the most humbling and fulfilling sports one can undertake. Anyone that has wrestled can easily tell you why wrestling is humbling. It is you and your opponent and when you get beat there is only one person that can truly explain the reason for your failure, and that person is the reflection looking back at you in the mirror.

Where It All Began

Like many, growing up I looked up to my older brother and wanted to do whatever he did. The town we grew up in had a single stoplight and was extremely small. At that time Northeast Indiana was doing great wrestling-wise and so was the school in our town.

We didn't have the most stable childhood, our parents divorced, and we moved around a lot. My brother's freshman year of high school he was living in Ohio with some relatives and made the varsity wrestling team. I got to watch him wrestle and my immediate thought was, "I am going to do that one day."

The Turning Point

The winning streak quickly went away when I started high school. I made varsity my freshman year and barely had a winning record. My turning point was a match where a wrestler had me on my back with a headlock and looked down at me and said "what's the matter tired sissy" right before he pinned me.

That pride I had in my middle school success was gone and I told myself about the loss, "That isn't happening again." That summer I went to everything I could in the offseason. From sophomore through my senior year I only had 10 losses with 7 being to eventual state champions.

Finding Purpose in Coaching

Around this time my old high school coach called me up and asked me to come help coach his son. This started to help me heal as a person and was when I found my understanding and true love for the sport. I began to realize that my coach was right when he would always say, "It is not about the destination it is about the journey."

When I looked back at my life I realized wrestling taught me how to lose gracefully, how to work hard towards a goal, how to channel and control my anger, how to accept true disappointment, and how to keep grinding. Those things were crucial for a kid with broken family life and unending inner anger.

More Than State Champions

When I had my first child 12 years ago and I found out he was a boy I had immediate visions of him being a state champion. As my wife and I have attempted to raise him and his 2 brothers the best we can, I began to throw away the visions of raising state champions.

More important than state champions I want to raise good human beings that understand the value of work and how to grind through things. I believe that wrestling is truly a pure vehicle for this and one I understand.