04 February, 2014

Will your son continue wrestling in Australia?

Recently I've been asked by several people about whether our son can continue wrestling in Australia while we're there for a year. So I thought I'd write a little bit about that here.

It was, indeed, one of the first things we thought about when planning this upcoming home
For those of you who aren't sure. Queensland is the
state that we're from (north-eastern state). Brisbane
is in the south-eastern corner.
assignment. His passion for the sport is such that it would be cruel to not allow him to continue to participate. Indeed it is a sport that is best approached with a long-view and taking a year off in the middle isn't a great idea. On Saturday at our local meet, I mistakenly said that one first-year wrestler was "a good wrestler". I was quickly corrected by a long-term coach who said, "No, he's a first-year wrestler who has a lot of potential." To realise that potential, longer-term consistent work is needed.

So, we did a Google search, and found that there is indeed wrestling in Australia (though we'd never heard of it before). And there is a club in Brisbane that our son could join for the duration of our time there (there are in fact, only three clubs in the whole state). 

The bonus is that our younger two sons can also join. They've seen a lot of wrestling in the last three years and are pretty keen. Our youngest son definitely wants to do this in middle and high school at CAJ too. Our middle son, true to his nature, is reserving his commitment till he's tried it out in Australia.

So, our adventure in this land of wrestling continues. It will be interesting to see the lay of the land of Australian wrestling. As a nation, we've only had three medalists, and all of those in the first half of the 20th century. Australia sent one wrestler to the London Olympics. I'll be interested to see the level of competition as compared to what we're seeing at the moment.

2 comments:

Ken Rolph said...

I thought Australia imported all its wrestlers from Eastern Europe. Perhaps your son should begin learning some Bulgarian wrestling terms.

Wendy said...

I think you are fairly right Ken. Our Olympic wrestler at London was born in Iran.
Our son is fairly used to multilingual wrestling environment. Both his school coaches are bilingual and he's also a member of a Japanese club, which is almost all in Japanese.