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. On the heels of a week-long, elite-level training camp at the Bahna Wrestling Center, Andy writes about the CKWC training cycle and stresses the importance of supporting our Olympic-level athletes.
MONDAY, MARCH 12
It’s been two weeks since my last blog and over those couple weeks, our team had some time off following a good training cycle that began in January and finished in Ukraine. While several of our club guys went home for a short time, I spent a few days in California with my girlfriend and her family. It was a much-needed and appreciated break, especially from the frigid temperatures we endured overseas.
When I got back to Ann Arbor, Sean Bormet and I sat down to finalize our team’s training plan through the Olympic Trials. We began doing two-a-days a couple weeks ago. When you’re training athletes using two-a-day workouts, your plan must be followed very strictly to avoid injuries and overtraining. Last week, we were fortunate to have several elite wrestlers come here to train with us at the Bahna Wrestling Center, including five-of-seven Canadian Olympic team members.
Right now we’re focusing our training on low intensity but high minutes. We’re doing a lot of situations and, for our live wrestling, having them wrestle one match each practice. I’ll put the guys in a certain position and let them go on their own for a period of time. They are able to clear their minds after a good scramble and figure out why they were successful or unsuccessful in that situation.
I like doing it this way to promote learning — not just learning how to do the move successfully but to learn how to adapt. If I were to just make the guys wrestle matches, they would be areas that they wouldn’t get in. By putting them in a variety situations and positions, they are learning how to defend everything, and they are learning how to finish no matter what defense is thrown at them. I can see them evolving into complete wrestlers. As we continue to prepare for the trials, I am confident that they will wrestle seamlessly. It doesn’t matter who they wrestle, because they will be ready for anything that is thrown their way — both offensively and defensively.
I am so excited to be a part of our Cliff Keen Wrestling Club in Ann Arbor, and it’s an exciting time to be involved with the sport of freestyle wrestling. It’s an Olympic year! We are coming off a high finish at the World Championships and we have five-of-seven weights qualified. It’s also a good opportunity for our sport to capitalize on the Olympic fever. Our country is simply not on a level playing field with some of the other nations we compete against. Russia, for example, has a new initiative is called Fight and Win with Putin. The President of Russia is personally backing their wrestling team. The USOC gets no money from the U.S. government, and I believe we are the only country to do it this way. We’re in an uphill battle in the U.S., because we are constantly looking for sponsors to help with the cost of sending guys overseas, developing new talent and trying to support athletes so they can focus solely on training.
Being here at Michigan with a club and working with Zeke and many others to put together the Friends of Freestyle Alliance, I know how much work is involved to create something great. In order to have the world’s best freestyle team, America needs to put in a lot of work. Here at Michigan, it is our coaching staff’s goal to have the best Regional Training Center in America. Again, I know how much work and money this is going to take. Life will never be fair, and wrestling will never have anything gift-wrapped and given to us. We, as a wrestling community, need to work together in order to have the best freestyle team in the world. We cannot take a passive approach and expect to win world and Olympic championships. We have to support our athletes, and we have to make sure we have programs in place to develop future generations of wrestlers. We must find a way to fund the developmental and RTC programs and keep them sustainable for the future. Nobody is just going to do it for us; we have to band together and tackle it ourselves. This is what makes us wrestlers tough. We have to fight for everything. Simply being good will never be enough for a wrestler; we want to fight to become the best.
Andy
