Personal Narrative Essay: Starting A New Sport

For anyone, starting a new sport is tough. I had that problem when I started the sport of wrestling. I was in 8th grade when I started wrestling in the Elk Grove Jr. Grens wrestling club. I was mainly convinced by my little brother, who had been wrestling for a few years already and had really liked it, my dad, and his good friend who ran the program, who had actually started wrestling around the same age I did. I went to the first day of practice knowing very little about wrestling, only what I had seen from watching my brothers previous tournaments. I had went through about a month of practice when the first tournament came along. I was very nervous. I ended up losing my match that day but I didn’t let it get to me. At other tournaments, I had very fierce competition, I was put up with state qualifiers or kids that had been wrestling since they were four years old. I didn’t win many matches that year, but I did win matches where I was least expected to.

The place where I won my first match was in a big convention center down in Springfield, IL. There is a yearly tournament there on MLK weekend and it is a very fun weekend because everyone from the team, and their families, drive down and stay there for the weekend. But, at

Some think it’s football, some hockey. I feel that wrestling is the toughest sport anyone can put themselves through. It is you and another person out on a mat by yourselves trying to pin each other to the mat and score points. You are out there for what seems like the toughest six minutes of your life, usually more than once or twice in a day. Also, you have to make weight for every tournament so that means also pushing your body when you’re not on the mat to eat less and lose weight. But, after you make weight and weigh in you can eat, so it’s not all that bad. A famous man in the wrestling community named Dan Gable once said, “Once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is