Friday October 14th 2016

As the inaugural wrestling season kicked off for the year 2016-17, I find myself looking at events from the past as well as the future.

To recap, Quebec athletes had a successful summer with results at the Junior Pan Ams and Junior Worlds.  Quebec’s lone representative, Dory Yeats had a respectable 5th place at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio to finish off the summer.

Quebec athletes also had a strong showing at Copa Sparta in San Juan over the Thanksgiving weekend and the FISU games will be coming up soon in Corum Turkey.

Locally, Quebec will be center for a National Referees clinic at the Concordia Inviational and younger athletes will begin their season with the Quebec Open and G.M.A.A. starting up soon.

With all these positives happening in our province concerning wrestling, I find myself contemplating as to why it’s sometines hard for our various clubs to recruit and hold on to athletes at a variety of levels.  The sport of wrestling is a challenging one, but ultimately rewarding in that it teaches the athlete many life lessons.  Wrestlers have the benefit of being some of the fittest athletes in any sport so the physical benefits cannot be disputed.  Last but not least, wrestling instills discipline which for many young people, is integral in their development as a person.

The Team USA website recently published an article about our unique uniform, the singlet.  In this article, they cite that in our changing times, it might be time to eliminate the singlet as our primary uniform in favour of spandex tops and fight shorts.  While the article does raise some valid points, and I’m always in favour of changing the sport in order to help its promotion, as a purist I think that the option should be there to wear the singlet if one chooses.  It would be interesting to poll the various clubs to see if the singlet is a deterrent to both our recruitment and retention process.  What do you think, singlets or shorts and t-shirts?

Singlet or Shorts?

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