A letter from Dec 01, 2022

Dear FutureMe, Today after school, like always, I had wrestling practice. Except for this wrestling, the practice was a lot more fun than usual because I had a wrestle-off. In this, played two full-length, six-minute matches with two of my teammates. After that, two teammates wrestled each other for a spot at junior varsity for their weight class. The winner of that match would go on to challenge the person in their weight class that was on Varsity. After that happened, we started to do cradle drills, but then my coach called me over and told me that I had earned myself a spot at the next junior varsity. Even though I had not challenged anyone for their spot at junior varsity, the coaches had apparently deemed me worthy to compete with other Junior Varsity wrestlers. This made me extremely proud of myself because it means I had performed well enough. This is significant to me on two different levels. One, because I had been doing club wrestling for around 4 years before COVID hit, so it means that all that time I had been protesting, (as I did not really like wrestling at the time) I was just building experience, for if I took that experience into my high school athletic career. The other level is that I had not only proved to my coach that I was good enough to be with JV, but I had (more importantly) proved to myself that I was good enough to compete with people older than me. However, right before I was supposed to wrestle off for a spot at a JV spot, my coach called me over to inform me that there was a sophomore in my weight class who had taken the spot at the tournament and since anybody older than you got priority over that kind of thing, so I really had no say in it.