WE HAVE A MAT!!!!!

Yes you read that right, we now have a wrestling mat, well kind of at least.   A local rancher happened to "come across" one of the old mats before the program was canceled last time and he's been storing it in his house.  He said that it's old, crusty, and definitely "not new" but it's better than wrestling on the ground or the carpet.

I ran into him at the county fair and when he told me that I was so excited that I couldn't wait to get home and do something wrestling related.  Had he been heading home I probably would have followed him the 30 miles to his house just to look at the mat.  I think that Sunday I'll try to run out there and get a picture or two of it.  That was a HUGE weight off of my shoulders I'd really been stressing over where I would find one and  what I would do if I couldn't locate one.  I had contemplated purchasing several home mats and then selling them after the season but I wasn't looking forward to fronting the bill for those, and our only other option was going to be to load up the kids and take them across the river into Goldendale or down to The Dalles for practices.

Sherman Wrestling is moving forward and big things are coming, now do we join ORWAY or run an independent club as a fundraiser like Heppner does?  Thoughts?

Good news and bad news about our wrestling room.

I took a tour of the Wasco grade school today to see where we might be able to practice, there's good news and bad news coming up:

First the good news.

 To my surprise the guy in charge of scheduling for the school had a great room for us, small and cheap for them to heat, closed from the rest of the school so that our mats can stay out all the time and be safe, large enough for at least 3 sections of mat, maybe four.  The room is not huge by any means but it is easily double the size of what Heppner has for their Varsity team.  The Gym is right next door and isn't used during the days that we would be practicing so we'd be able to use it to warm up, play games, or to spill into if we have too many bodies for the smaller room.  

Now the bad news.

Our wrestlers are going to get lots of rug burns and not many mat burns practicing on carpet instead of a mat because we STILL DON'T HAVE A MAT!  I'm starting to reach near panic mode and I'm going to begin calling all the schools and coaches that I can think of until I find one that will sell/loan/give us some sections of mat, even if it doesn't make a full circle, as long as it's a mat.

We're back and running again.

After a long hiatus that lasted all of last season I'm back to blogging and ready to go.  A lot has happened in the past year so I'll run down some of the highlights. 
After a lot of calling I finally got a meeting with the Sherman High School AD.  He shared some good news and some bad news with me.

First the good news:  He likes the idea of a wrestling program at Sherman High school and hopes that it can happen.  There are some hoops that I need to jump through first: 

• Start a youth program and maintain it for a couple of years to show that there in interest.  
• Find the gear (or money for the gear) I guess that all of the gear they used to have was given away, including their mat, warmups, singlets etc
• Be able to show that wrestling can be financially affordable when compared to other sports.  I guess that last time they had a program the cost per athlete was astronomical.  I am not going to share the number that he gave me because there must have been a mistake in someone's math but let's just say it was WAY (like add a zero) higher than any of the other sports.

 Secondly I believe that I found a location for our youth wrestling this winter, the best part of that is they won't charge us anything to use it either.  More on that later.I really should get back to work.