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The strength and stamina governing of sports is over, and the age of the mentally tough athlete has arrived
The strength and stamina governing of sports is over, and the age of the mentally tough athlete has arrived
Sports psychology paper mental training
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When I was 13 Years old I loved wrestling. I grew up with it with my family all my life. Determined to join the eighth grade wrestling team in middle school, I made the team with no hesitation in October. I arrived to every single practice and did my work and then left to go home. Working hard for the first match of my wrestling career I was wanting to get my first victory. As weeks have passed and in November I was told of my first couple of matches. Training extra just to prepare for this major event in my life. As soon as the day came I was just focused on pinning my opponent. A warm day in November came, and I saw all these other schools approach my middle school. Students who are taller and bigger than me and I wondered who my first opponent …show more content…
Confident in my skills and all the work i've put into leading up to this day I walked and stepped onto the mat. I shook my opponent's hand and we began to wrestle. Nervous and so many thoughts were running through my mind, I just thought about pinning him to the ground. After the first half I was losing then I got back up on my feet and ended up pinning my opponent. Ecstatic about winning my first match ever in my career, I felt like I was on top of the world nothing could go wrong. Later that same day I was called for my second match of the evening. He stood about a foot taller than me and it was a hard match for me. I knew had more experience I could tell with all these speedy and fancy moves he was performing with. I ended up losing fairly quickly, but i didn't mind. I knew my mistakes and just looked for the next competition to get another win and not …show more content…
With days left until my first tournament I had my eyes set on winning a medal. With four days until the big event, I arrived to every practice before anyone else and was the last one to leave. I would never imagine anything bad would happen to me in this sport. Until the day before the tournament. Coach had all the wrestlers line up and wanted to see how we performed in front of him. As I watched all my people wrestle with each other he called my name and I stepped forward. He called my friend as well and it was on. I felt nervous and i hesitated for a lot of good opportunities to take him down. He grabbed me by the waist and I fell to the ground and struggled to get back up. All I remember was lying face up and he came down to pin me to take the win. My instinct told me to move out of the way to try and get up and put a reverse on him so that I would win but, that wasn't the best idea. My mind would go blank for a few seconds and I didn’t feel anything for a quick second, lifeless. I came back to realize what had happened and all I heard was the crack of celery thinking that someone was cooking vegetables. I sat up and looked to my right arm only to see that it had extended outward and I didn’t know if it was broken or not. Coach told everyone to leave immediately to the locker room as I was just scared that my mom would yell at me. My heart pounding through my skin. In shock
I have many things that I love in this life, one of those things is wrestling. I have been wrestling for seven years and I have developed quite the passion and love for it. Wrestling has always been an interesting sport for me. Growing up in Oregon I watched my uncles wrestle in high school. I watched both of them win their state tournament in their respective weight classes, this is one of my fondest memories of my childhood. One of them went on to wrestle division one, I thought this was the coolest thing in the world. I looked up to my uncles and wanted to be just like them. I did not always wrestle though. The process of pursing my dream as of becoming a wrestler started of with basketball, then went to a rocky start, then being on Worland High School wrestling team.
The sweat was dripping down my face as I pushed the weights off my chest. Everyone ran towards their bags after a student said there was a gun in school. Twitter was the first source that we checked just to make sure. Boom! The door slammed open as coach Ben yells “Hurry up and get out”. My heart started beating faster and faster. We didn’t know what was going on. As we were running to the gym everyone was panicking and pushing each other. I could feel the burn on my elbow but I didn’t know what it was. When we got to the gym my elbow was covered in blood. We were told to get down and stay quiet. Later on we were told a student brought a gun to school and was planning on committing suicide. That was one of many gun incidents at my high school.
When we first arrived I’d thought we’d taken a wrong turn and went to a traveling gypsy convention by mistake. The whole field outside the school was filled with tents of various sizes and colors. 200 wrestlers, about thirty of which were girls, filtered about the area. As my soon-to-be teammates and I headed to the first practice, anxiety gnawed at my stomach like a dog with a bone (FL). I wanted to impress everybody, and prove that I could make it in this sport. Before we started, the coach patted me on the shoulder. “I’ve got your back all right.” he told me. I smiled and nodded. At least one person was looking out for me.
I woke up in the morning ready for my fourth basketball game that week. I wasn’t really hungry so all I had for breakfast was a granola bar. We arrive at the game ready to play. I don’t what it was but I was I have never been so tired in a game before. The last quarter of the game is when it all happened. Me and number 0 went up for the rebound and her butt ran into my stomach really hard. I didn’t feel pain right away, it was more like something was pressing down on my stomach. I continued to play in the game for about a minute before the pain started to kick in. I told my coach to sit me out because I wasn’t feeling well. I sat on the bench squirming around and rubbing my stomach. My coach wanted me to walk the pain out
With the rest of the basketball girls from the surrounding area, I began summer basketball camp. There was a basketball tournament where we played 4 games in one day. During the game an opponent stole the ball, so I chased her down the court. Once I reached her under their basket, I tripped over her foot, fell, and heard something snap. I was absolutely freaking out. The referees ran down to me. All I could say was “Something popped! Something popped!” I couldn’t bend my leg at the knee, it was scary. I was brought to the main lobby to walk it off. I couldn’t bend my leg for two weeks.
Then one day, when he had to go in for a routine inspection, he fainted before the dentist could touch him. That night, he faced the dentist and got him to pull out a tooth because he wanted to preserve his reputation from the embarrassment. Similarly, when I was a black belt, I was known for being quite the creative and subtle fighter. However, people with strengths in that subject, I had a weakness, a fatal flaw in exchange for an advantage in other terms. It was that I never wore a groin protector, shin guards and arm guards as it hinders movement. My opponent knew that, he took advantage of it, and I was there on the mat, in agony and embarrassed. The next few days, I sulked around watching him spar and the next time I fought him, I utilized my newfound knowledge of his weakness, his back was unprotected, and I mopped the floor with him. Like Curt, I held my reputation as my first priority, and when it was hurt, we both went great lengths to repair
I had little to no motivation for a while and thought that maybe wrestling wasn’t the sport for me. I had shown promise in practice but as soon as I got on the mat for a tournament or duel I just drew a blank. I wasn’t executing any of the techniques I had learned after so many repetitive drills. I wasn’t the only one that had faced such miserable losses but it felt like it. My teammates helped me through my rut by giving me additional advice during practice and being in my corner while I wrestled matches. It was a great feeling knowing that I had people who had my back whenever I needed help. The wrestling team was a close knit group that dealt with all our problems together. We worked hard and played hard together till none of us could go any further. We were each other’s motivation, rivals, and family on and off the mat. If I had any doubts about a match my team thought the exact opposite and made sure that I understood why they believed so. But what made us a strong unit was the fact that we had similar goals and values. None of us wanted to lose and planned to make it past districts. We all wanted to take home hardware not only for our own self recognition but also to bring back a trophy to put on our principal’s desk who just so happened to love the wrestling program about as much as our team. All of us valued the effort that was put into every early morning practice so no one looked down on each other. The connection we had as a team made my experience wrestling all the more worth
Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes Roland Barthes's essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes's critique -- which is above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is -- is useful here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell -- the dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption more graphically than any other play in the cycle -- as spectacle offers a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily produces the audience.
I was watching the action at the heart of the club. This is where the more experienced judokas practiced, all of them looking fluent in every move they pulled off. Nobody ever made a mistake by the look of it. There was an older boy, around sixteen, nonchalantly throwing people to the ground, it seemed as if it was as easy as breathing to him. That is what I wanted to be able to do, not necessarily with judo, but with interacting. My stomach groaned harder and harder the longer I watched, I was terrified. I was really nervous stepping on the mat, knowing how I would get thrown on my back as soon as I did. The instructor introduced me to the rest of the class, I wanted to be sick but continued on anyways. Looking back, I did act strangely, even though everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming I still didn’t want to be a part of it. To this day I wonder why I was awkward in social in social situations, it confuses me, but it was a major problem to me back then. When I was asked to pair up with someone a shiver crawled its way up my spine. I looked about panicking about who I was going to pair up with, no-one was to be seen but a boy of my size. A thin boy with two of his front teeth missing, it didn’t stop him smiling from ear to ear though. The instructor told me to grip his collar and pivot. The fact that I actually put my hands on him confuses me to this day, it felt weird and uncomfortable and at the time I hated
I didn’t care I still tried out. The cheers they had us do were easy the jumps were jumps I was doing in first grade. I made the team. I was happy even though deep down I was upset that I could be on the worst team in history. So as I started on the team, I soon realized that my idiot brother had no idea what he was talking about and it was a good team. I wanted to go back to my old coach so that I could learn how to do a back hand spring because everywhere I went I just couldn’t get myself to do it. Some coaches told me that it might be because I don’t trust them enough to do it. So I had a private class with her before her normal cheer practices. We were working on my round offs and cart wheels when she walked away to go answer her phone I went for my round off and didn’t land right and fell because it felt like my knee gave out. I got up and kept trying. When it was time for her teams to practice I was sitting on the floor in pain doing stretches with the girls thinking maybe if I just stretch it out itll feel better it didn’t I ignored it for a while till I went home and took my shoes off my foot swelled up like a balloon. I could barely walk
All my hopes and dreams had come true. I have been wrestling since I was twelve years old. Ever since then I've been trying to accomplish my dream of going to the Colorado State Wrestling Tournament. I decided that I wanted to be a good wrestler, and I wanted to be one of the top wrestlers in the state. I knew that the only way to accomplish my goal was to start wrestling as soon as possible and never give up.
After my win, my team was lined up to congratulate me; I was the only member from our team to pin their opponent. The feeling of the referee raising my arm was one of the, if not, the best overwhelming feeling I've ever felt in my life. Knowing that I won that match on my own gave me great confidence that I was just as good as anyone in my bracket. I kept telling myself that if I made it that far, then I must be. As I moseyed to my seat where the team was sitting, people were patting me on my way up the stairs. People I didn't even know were congradulating me, telling me way to go, good job. That feeling was one of the best too. As I took my seat and got ready to watch the Waitmanator, one of my teammates wrestle, a reporter came up and sat right beside me. He shook my hand and started asking me all kinds of questions. I told him everything he wanted to know, and after he was done talking to me, I got that feeling in my stomach again. That made me really pumped up for my next match. The very next day was even better. The reporter put me and all of my quotes in the paper. Now, everybody knew about my match. Things were just going my way.
Ever since the previous season I had my standards set high. I had placed fifth, which was all right for the time being, but I knew as time went on I needed to push myself and increase my level of wrestling. I decided that I would do whatever it took, through thick and thin. I traveled to small local tournaments in Colorado, and a couple out-of-state tournaments, I even traveled to Delaware. It didn't really matter how I did at these tournaments because it was just all practice until February. So, I lifted and wrestled just about every chance I got. It was all in preparation for one match, six minutes.
Finally Friday came. The tournament lasted for about three hours, peppered with constant complaints, arguments, and threatened fist fights. To my own disbelief, we lost -- by one point! For the rest of the night I rationalized our loss by creating stories of how they must have cheated, accented by remarks about the character blemishes of their mothers. I just kept saying that we were still the best and it didn't matter that we had lost. By the end of the night no one was speaking to me, not even my partner in the competition. I finally snuck off and went home. All the way, I could feel myself choking on ...
It was the start of summer 2002, and the Mid America Youth Basketball (MAYB) national tournament was taking place in Andover, Kansas. Along with the rest of the team, I was excited to play some basketball for the first time since the middle school basketball season was over. Our team, Carlon Oil, had been together and played every summer for the last four years. We were a really good team, with an overall record of 65-4 over those four years and were hoping to continue our legacy. Lonnie Lollar, our coach for the summer, was also the coach of our high school basketball team. I had a history of groin injuries, and every summer it seemed that I would have to sit out at least a game on the bench icing my groin. But this summer was different, and I along with everyone in the gym wouldn't have expected my summer to end with a injury such as a broken leg.