As it has been since we began the journey of building the USAW/MWA Beat the Streets last January with one program and 28 kids, it has been a year of wonderful surprises. Yesterday was yet another one!

In organizing Wrestling Day, we wanted to bring together all the “parts” of the initiative expanding the base of wrestling in the New York City metropolitan area to Baruch Middle School, the home of the site of the inaugural program that was established in 2004-05!...

The Winter Programs were invited along with as many of their kids, parents and boosters as were able to attend. We also had the spring coaches attending, achieving USA Wrestling Certification through a required bronze level clinic. We began at 10:30am with a review of the basic skills that they learned over the past 10 weeks.

When one of the new teams invited Bushwick, Brooklyn, arrived and lined up 35 kids all dressed in their club T-Shirts and began walking in a single column around the outside edge of the mats to an area adding to the 100 kids already working on the mat, it made my heart beat faster. In all my 50 years of teaching and coaching I never had the same feeling as I had yesterday. It was then I said to myself, what a great thing we are doing for kids.

The kids participated for 60 minutes on the 7 Basic Skills and an introduction of learning new techniques with these skills. Coaches Mark Harman and Chris Poli of Baruch were busily organizing with the other coaches a scrimmage of matches with all the kids. For the next two hours, they wrestled had fun while 15 new coaches adjourned to a classroom continuing with their certification process.

We will have 10-12 new teams beginning next week going for 10 weeks meeting 3 times per week for 2 hours with an additional 200-300 kids adding to the 150 completing their 10 week unit.

There were many parents of the kids, supervisors and several members of the Funding Board speaking to the coaches outlining their involvement with help raising sponsorships for the program.

John Welch, newly elected President of the MWA, opened Wrestling Day by speaking to the group about his involvement in wrestling as a teacher/coach, parent of wrestlers and his wrestling experience as well as the role of the MWA.

Members of the Beat the Streets Wrestling Inc, were in attendance as well lending a hand supervising and teaching the kids.

Next year, Wrestling Day will be the inaugural New York City Middle School Wrestling Championships that will be held in one of the area’s local colleges.

Year One is in the books and we begin next week with Year Two. We intend having 60 middle schools programs being funded with new wrestling mats, equipment, certified teachers/coaches training and educating over 1000 new kids in the sport of wrestling.

What a great program we have begun!

Omar West, Baruch Middle School controlling his opponent in the inaugural USAW/MWA Wrestling Day Beat the Streets Program held last week-end in New York City.

The Brute Headguard, donated by the Brute Group to all 150 participants, is well lit and makes a nice picture for one of our Sponsors