Yesterday we spent the day competing at the hammer tournament at Top of the Podium in Northern Virginia. I feel compelled to take this opportunity to provide a bit of context for our involvement in this tournament.
There was a time when elite youth wrestling in NOVA was dominated by a dual meet calendar administered by the CAWL (Capital Area Wrestling League). Today the CAWL is not what it once was and there is a new movement in NOVA centered around regional centers of excellence that are not bound to any single school district but attempts to create an environment where wrestlers in a general area can come to train and where the competition schedule has a wide variety of options for all wrestlers depending on ability and willingness to travel. The wrestlers who train out of these regional centers have a smorgasbord of options for competition and if there was a void left by the CAWL, Tom is helping to fill it.
I grew up in central PA where this was a well proven model for many years and that still exists and thrives today and produces the best wrestlers in the country. Iowa may win the NCAA tournament this year. If they do, it will be because they recruited wrestlers from PA. When I was a kid we'd go to a local tournament to compete and there was always a table somewhere with printouts for the tournaments for the next several weeks advertised. You would write a check and mail in the registration form. Today the same model exists at the same venues but all of the tournaments are browsable on a single site (www.pywrestling.com) and registration is done online. The site in VA is www.virginiawrestling.com. URL to Top is https://www.topofthepodium.org/
When I walked into Top of the Podium it didn't take me long to run across Tom Houck, the man behind the mission. I'll call it a mission more than a facility because the mission is clear. He wants to promote wrestling in the most entitled area of the country where it is most desperately needed. I was talking to Joe Scanlan about this and we are in violent agreement that this a sport that is very needed in the area and we will do everything we can to support it. Wrestling isn't a game. It isn't always fun. You get what you earn. There is absolutely nothing about the sport that rewards a kid for just showing up. On the other hand if a kid does just show up but hasn't put in the work it won't work out too well for that kid LOL... This is why we as coaches talk about the value of the sport and how these are life lessons. Work is rewarded with results and there are lessons in every failure.
I was at Tom's facility all day and didn't have the opportunity to talk to him until the very end of the day. This is because Tom was on a mission the entire day and was relentlessly engaged in running the event. Hard work. What is Tom's reward? Perhap Tom has seen the benefit of the sport in his life and he wants to give back? Maybe he wants to have a positive impact on NOVA. After 1 year in this new facility I'd say he's off to a pretty darn good start.
We had a great day at Top and took about 10 kids. The highlight for me as a coach was our 4 wrestlers for whom this was their first tournament outside of novice level competition.
Calvin Cardone
Benji Cardone
Julian Bonner
Michael Bonura
The benefit to more advanced competition for these wrestlers is that they learn that bad technique doesn't work here and we take these lessons back to training and now there is a purpose to the training. Practicing with a purpose makes the difference.
Enjoy the holidays!
Coach Burns
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