Is It Too Soon to Be Excited?

When is it too soon to get started thinking about the 2013-2014 High School Wrestling Season?  Do we have to wait until Halloween?  Not this blogger.  College wrestling has already started their official practices and they are counting down the days to the first competition in November.  High school wrestling starts up almost a month later but thinking about how the Bullet Wrestlers will fair this year is top of mind...especially after seeing this YouTube video by our strength trainer extraordinaire, Dane Miller.  The video features Bullet Wrestler Dan Schmeck.  Dan has been working hard on summer, lifting consistently at "the Garage".  I think when you watch the video, you will agree that his hard work is paying off.  Most Sundays, Dan can also be found in the Lehigh University wrestling room.  He has also been wrestling some pre-season tournaments with Steel Mat Club and went 4-1 a few weeks ago.  This Bullet Wrestler is not afraid of hard work.

See the YouTube video here>>> Schmeck Doing Work 

Does Clothing Make the Wrestler?

Considering the long history of wrestling, dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, the singlet is a relatively modern invention.  Statues and drawings from ancient times show the wrestlers only scantily clad, if that.  Thankfully, somewhere between the ancient times and the 1920 wrestlers started to wear clothes.  By the 30’s most amateur wrestlers sported full length tights and something called an outside supporter called a "black tom".

The next evolution took place between the mid 30’s through WWII.  The outside supporter was replaced with trunks.  Shirts were still optional, mostly depending upon where you were wrestling.  Most east coast teams, donned the shirt while the mid-west teams like Oklahoma State, went shirtless.  For dual meets where an east coast team would be wrestling against a mid-west team, it was the home team who got to determine if it was skins or shirts.  It wasn’t until 1966 that the NCAA actually required the 3 piece uniform which included the trunk, tights and shirts.  No more shirt-less dual meets.  (Is this when our attendance started to drop?  And we blame Title IX.)

US amateur wrestlers were introduced to the one-piece wrestling singlet at the Rome Olympics in 1960 however the singlet didn’t hit collegiate and high school wrestling rooms until the 70’s.  Bullet wrestlers first started wearing the one-piece singlet over tights in the 1974 yearbook.  It wasn’t until the 1986 yearbook that the tights totally disappeared from the pictures and we were left with the current look. 

While singlet styles change slightly from year to year, there have not been any big changes for almost 30 years.  Is there a need for a change and what would we change it to?  Are there any advantages to changing the singlet from the fan or the wrestlers’ perspective?  Would it help us grow wrestling?

Take our poll.  Leave a comment.  Looking to hear some comments on this one.