The Life of College Wrestler
Jake Filkins is a Victory athlete who attends the University of Minnesota and competes for the Golden Gophers wrestling team. His blog will outline the life of a college wrestler.
February 23, 2010
The last month of the season has really changed for all of the redshirt freshman. Since the week before the Iowa dual, practices are pretty much devoted 100% to the starters. We’re the pawns to make them better. Usually, we get ten minutes to warm up and ten minutes to drill on our own. Than it’s one-on-one technique with the coaches for the starters. Live goes have changed from longer goes to a lot of 7 minute and 3 minute mini matches. Although, on days the starters have off, the young guys usually have an hour or 45 minute go. If you are practicing with a starter you wrestle in a group with them. Everyone else does four minute goes between the starters matches, so no one gets hurt, and there is more room.
Everyone except the starters still have morning workouts. They’ve changed a bit since winter break. We now drill Mondays and Fridays, lift Tuesdays and Thursdays, and do a circuit on Wednesdays. I’ve started to get use to getting up at 6:00am everyday, which could be why the workouts are getting easier. Even when I don’t have workouts I find myself waking up before 7.
I have classes with a lot of homework. I find myself doing a couple hours of homework every night compared to almost being done last semester. As a result, I quit my part time job because with having more classes (15 credits instead of 13) and a schedule with one hour breaks in-between all of my classes, I could only get 3 hours in a week. The team is looking good; I am excited to see how we do at Big Tens. No one will beat Iowa, but I think that we will definitely challenge Ohio State for second, and hopefully qualify all ten for nationals.
January 14, 2010
Coming back to the U for practice on January 2nd was really hard. My entire family was at the cabin snowmobiling, all of my friends were still home for a few more weeks and I was going to back just to work out. We were wrestling Iowa State on Sunday. January 2nd was a Saturday and practice was easy. Sunday’s was, too. We gave away the dual to Iowa State, so all of the Redshirts knew the following practices were going to be different.
Sanders lost a close one and Yohn got pinned with two seconds left and we lost by 2 points. Most of the coaches said we wrestled well; we almost beat the #2 team in the country. Then Jay spoke and gave us the speech we needed. He talked about how coming close is not good enough, everyone wants to win, not just come close.
The following Monday started the hardest two weeks of wrestling I’d ever experienced. I thought it would be easy, work out in the morning, go to my part time job, come back for afternoon practice and go chill in the dorms, but it wasn’t. The morning workouts were either a twenty minute hard run, or sprint laps around the football field; very tough. Monday Wednesday and Friday were circuit lifts with sprints in-between. These are 13 lifts with as many reps as possible for 50 seconds and ten seconds to get to the next station. I threw up after the first day. Tuesday and Thursday were cleans and squats. We do heavy weight 5 x 15 squats and 5 x 10 cleans. Then we wrestle hard in the afternoon.
This gives you an idea of what a college day is.
This past weekend the team went to the National Duals in Cedar Falls, IA. The whole team travels and everyone also has to make weight. The coaches decided not to tell us that until last Monday, so I was 14 pounds over weight with only 5 days to make it and have enough energy to get through the work outs they were putting us through. The weight just wasn’t coming off and I was still 6 sounds over when we left Friday. After three workouts, I finally made weight Saturday morning before we went to watch the tournament.
Minnesota had a very dominating performance in the first two duals over Missouri and Central Michigan, even with Schlatter out with a knee injury. Everyone looked good, and we thought for sure we had a good shot with Iowa in the quarter finals. However, Ness got hurt, and with Schlatter out, we had to shuffle weights and we got absolutely destroyed. The dual after with Ohio State wasn’t good, but it was a good experience to watch all the high class wrestling.
