As the Cliff Keen Wrestling Club nears the Olympic Trials in April, CKWC coach and veteran blogger Andy Hrovat will periodically share the progress, results and experiences from the road and inside the practice room. In his third installment, Hrovat writes from Ukraine, where he is participating in a two-week training with his CKWC wrestlers, and touches on their daily training schedule and how the United States can incorporate lessons learned from overseas.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7
I have been quite busy since the last time I wrote. I traveled to Ukraine last week with three of our Cliff Keen Wrestling Club athletes. It’s never easy to travel overseas, but it’s part of the sport and part of the job. It’s also a great opportunity for these guys. They seem to be doing a nice job adjusting to the time change while remaining sharp in their practices. I am very excited about these guys here and how they’re doing, and I know they will wrestle great in the upcoming tournament.
Yesterday was our tournament-simulation day, and we had four practice matches between 1-5 p.m. Today we will go back to our regular scheduled workouts of 8 a.m., 11:45 a.m. and 5 p.m. The workouts vary from day to day, but the first is usually a short jog to warm up followed by some drilling on the feet. The morning workout is held on the gym floor and not the mats. After the drill, we’ll do partner lifts, typically double legs or high crotches, and then we’ll finish up with some band work and stretching. We’ll eat breakfast at 9 a.m., and come back for the second workout, which will either be a wrestling workout or a game like basketball. Lunch is served at 2 p.m. and then the night training session, which has been wrestling every time, is at 5 p.m. We’ll finish the day with dinner at 7 p.m. and have the evening off to relax.
The training here still blows my mind. It seems more relaxed when compared to training in the United States. Sometimes the guys will joke with me about how much I like it over here and how I want to be Russian. This isn’t true at all. I love being an American and most of all I want to win. I gave it my all as an athlete, and I am giving it my all as a coach now. I’m just smart enough and humble enough to recognize that something these countries over here are doing is working and we can learn from them. As far as I know they haven’t changed the core of their training regimen for the past 40-50 years. It’s time we pick their brains to understand why they do things and what science is behind it.
I believe Zeke Jones is doing a great job in giving our athletes and coaches more opportunities to attend overseas training camps. This is crucial in our development as a country because we get a chance to see how the rest of the world trains. In order for the United States to become the best in the world, we have to work as one unit. We have so many different philosophies about how to train kids, high school wrestlers, college wrestlers and senior-level wrestlers. Right now I am working with Zeke and a few others to put together a support system for freestyle wrestling. I still believe that USA Wrestling needs to work from the top down.
We have made good changes to the national team training over the last several years; some of those improvements were brought back from our experiences at international training camps. It’s my hope that some of the changes will eventually work their way down to the college ranks then to the high schools and kids programs. All of these changes and improvements have taken a lot of man hours, money and sacrifice from many different people, and it will take greater man hours, money, and sacrifice before we can consistently become the best in the world year in and year out.
The United States has more wrestlers than any other country in the world. This alone should allow us to become the best wrestling nation. We just need to find our identity. You can say that the backbone of American wrestling is our ability to outwork the rest. But what good is the hardest-working athlete in the world if he doesn’t have the basic understanding of how to properly train? All that hard work is wasted.
I believe we need to reinvent ourselves as a nation. We need to be known as the country with the most wrestlers, the hardest-working wrestlers, the smartest wrestlers and, most importantly, the most technical wrestlers. In order to achieve this we need to have people willing to put in the work, we need to have money to support the ones working, and we need coaches at every level to be on board with the changes. As wrestling continues to evolve and change over time, coaches’ education will become the most important tool in American wrestling. We also need our athletes to buy into USA Wrestling’s system and spread that system throughout the country from the top down until we have seamless transitions from the youth level to high school to college and to the senior level.
Andy