For parents and athletes, making the decision to commit to a college wrestling program can be daunting. There are numerous factors to consider in order to choose the right school, let alone the right coach and team. We know that the academic needs are most important. It should be a huge factor in choosing a college. When I attended Menlo College, my father Lee Allen coached and directed all the athletes towards success in the classroom. Graduation was priority and the goal was to find a career after sport. This article specifically focuses on analyzing the team and coaching aspects, which will be important in deciding a program that fits you. 

There have been major breakthroughs in the knowledge of how the brain works and our ability to study that process. For years philosophers, psychologists and the medical community believed that the body and its brain functioned like a machine. With the advancement of the computer many said “that is it, that is how the brain works!”

For the past decade, I have been coaching boys and girls high school wrestling. It has been easier enrolling girls to wrestle than boys because I myself am a woman, and wrestled for the high school where I am currently coaching. Feedback from the athletes has been vital in order to encourage boys and girls to wrestle for the first time. It helps me understand how I can best support their goals and keep them coming back to the mat. Typically, I ask a new athlete why they want to join the sport. There are various reasons to why a young teen wants to join wrestling: getting into shape, being more confident, but my favorite is to be a part of a family. Over the last five years I have reiterated to high school athletes that wrestling isn't just a team, but a family and a culture to help shape and support becoming a better individual all around.

As the fastest growing sport in the US, wrestling is attracting new females to the sport. The US is well on it’s way to sanctioning girls wrestling in every state in order to have all-girls teams. However, while sanctioning is a work in progress and states are growing their participation numbers, this means many girls across the US who want to wrestle must compete against the boys. This poses a challenge for the athlete, the parents, and the coaches. This article chronicles two female athletes who were the only girls on their high school team. Forrest Molinari grew up wrestling in California, and continued her career to make world teams for Team USA. Rose Martines started wrestling her Junior year in Oregon, and completed her Senior year as the only female on her high school team. Neither athlete had a female wrestler come before them as the example for how to be the only girl on the boys team, they were the trend setters. As we continue to encourage girls to try this amazing sport, we are going to need the experiences of others to forge a path each generation that comes to the mat after us.

There is a lot of pressure for young athletes to be successful. Being successful on the playing field has education, career, and social implications. The better the athlete, the greater the scholarship amount to play a collegiate sport, the greater chance of continuing on a professional level. The better the result, the more recognition the athlete or the parent receive from those around them. The notion that sport is fun, which instills healthy active lifestyles and teaches life skills, has been put on the back burner. The idea that multi-sport athletes produce whole athletes with better overall skills, has become second to specialization. It is believed that single-sport sport specific skills produces the highest quality. Here's the danger with this mentality: it feeds the mindset that if specializing at 18 years old is ideal, then specializing at 13 is even better. And if this is the case, then we should begin specializing our children in one sport at 8 to get an earlier start ahead of peers.

Mallory Velte started her wrestling journey in California. Despite first being told she could not join the team, she has pushed past obstacles to become a 3x college national champion, a junior and senior world team member, and one of the top wrestlers in the country. Read about her decision making for wrestling in college, and how the lessons she learned can help make your search more simple.

Food is typically a contentious topic in wrestling. There's the team that believes you should wrestle at your natural weight, and the other team which believes that cutting weight is more advantageous. However, cutting extreme amounts of weight will not provide a healthy athlete in the long run. Eventually, the body breaks down and what could have been a long healthy career is cut short.

In 2012, shortly after qualifying for my first Olympic team, I began to feel a pop in my collar bone area while wrestling. Training at that point was specific and tailored to the olympic team. I was constantly aware of this injury, but didn't have the luxury of taking time to address the problem. It eventually went from discomfort to sharp pain. I would drill with someone much lighter than me, and just grabbing my normal standing single, I would literally see red. It wasn’t really a time to panic and true to my nature, I really didn’t discuss it outside of Terry Steiner, Kim Martori of Sunkist, and my physical trainers at the Training Center.

Kelsey Campbell has been a pillar in the sport of women's wrestling. From famously beginning her wrestling career late in high school, becoming ASU's first female wrestler ever, and making the 2012 Olympic team in historic fashion, Kelsey has had a long and full career. But it hasn't been without setbacks. She has continued to find a way to make it look easy to someone on the outside, but is able to reveal the hard work and resiliency that is the backbone of her career. Kelsey brings us up close and personal with her injuries in sport and how they have made her tougher.

Basic nutrition is no longer common place in our world, especially in the US. When it comes to making good decisions, we've unfortunately never been given the right tools. As we live our lives on the go, we reach more for alternatives than for whole foods. Even as athletes, we are still faced with the misconceptions that society instills. How do we educate ourselves to rise above the ideas that most of our peers and the people around us believe to be true about nutrition? We've brought back world medalist Othella Feroleto to help us address common misconceptions and to give us helpful tips.

We have a bit of a dilemma in the US: if you want to wrestle on your high school team in most states, you must wrestle the boys. Unfortunately, most parents and athletes are not comfortable with the idea of competing in a contact sport with boys. This means female athletes who would like the sport of wrestling are less inclined to join. As prideful as it may be to compete against the opposite gender and be successful, it doesn't always prove fruitful for the sport in the long run.

Othella Feroleto is a former athlete for the US Army World Class Athlete Program, has an extensive wrestling resume, and is now pursuing her masters degree in human-nutrition and dietetics. We are thrilled to have nutrition advice from someone who has wrestled and traveled the world. That kind of experience helps you advise younger wrestlers who are looking to reach a new level of training.

Wrestlers and athletes spend years learning how to eat better for performance, and then transfer that knowledge to life. Once you've weeded through all the nutritional knowledge, you'll find that a few tips are tried and true. Below are techniques that help with learning your body, and how to appropriately portion your meals throughout the day.

I can't begin to tell you how many women and girls have shared with me their concern for getting "bulky." In order to avoid this, they focus hours on the elliptical, running on treadmills, and climbing the stair master. Afterwards, they may walk across the gym and pick up 5, 10, or 15 pound dumbbells to do a couple sets or curls or presses. I rarely see women curl or press dumbbells that are so heavy they can barely finish their set of 8-10 repetitions. Why is this?

If you are up to date on athlete trends, you'll have heard about meal prepping. Not only are there countless articles you can read on how to actually meal prep, but also instagram accounts showing others' gorgeously stacked tupperware for their week's meals. But who is actually using this and using it well? And is it actually benefitical for athletes?

As a beginner wrestler, how do you become effective in competition without obsessing over learning every technique? When we focus solely on the need to perfect technique, it can often prevent you from seeing the big picture. What is sport, but accepting the challenge from another competitor to compete to your best abilities? By simplifying the idea of sport, we can focus on being a fierce competitor, and focus on where to position yourself for the best advantage. I've seen many great wrestlers who learned how to be tough competitors without high level technique. In good time, the technique will come with work and repetition.

For every sport competition, we have our typical packing list of must haves: uniform, food, water, lucky socks. But the more we compete, the more we find ourselves in situations where we didn't have what we needed. And even though we try and buffer for most situations, not everyone knows what to pack just in case. Here are the 5 items you should never forget to bring with you to a competition.

Wrestling has a stigma about weight cutting, and often the wrestling community is perpetuating it ourselves. In my opinion, it is emphasized much too heavily and much too young. Through competing, coaching, and educating young wrestlers about the sport, I have observed that our young athletes are taught they might only be successful if they compete at a lower weight. The number of males and females I've spoken to who have decided not to continue their career onto a collegiate or international level, have mostly been due to burn out from weight cutting. When does it become impractical to maintain a weight class? Should our minds, bodies, technique, and love for the sport suffer? This post is meant to be a guide for young athletes to navigate the pressures they may be receiving to cut weight.

Whenever I speak with my adult female friends on nutrition, I often hear them speak about wanting to "get back to eating clean." When I ask them what does that mean or look like for them, it is often "oh, super super healthy and I do everything perfect." 

We are inherently influenced by what something looks like that we are about to eat. It's in our DNA, as a visual cue was what protected us from eating something poisonous while we were hunters and gatherers. Second cue? Taste and texture. I know this well as I was an extremely picky eater as a child, and my fight or flight radars went off often with new foods. Texture was big for me and I was extremely resistant to trying anything new. I was encouraged to not give up and am proud to say that today, I will try anything once (well almost anything). Your body needs fuel to go, and recognizing that your choices make a difference can help you make changes for the better as an athlete, and for the rest of your life as a healthy human!