Not everyone can be a champion, but anyone can be a winner! This means that anyone who participates in wrestling, regardless of age or athletic ability, has the potential to be a WINNER. A winner is someone who has learned to face a challenge and overcome an obstacle and has persevered to the end. In other words, a winner is one who "has found the good fight and finished the race." Winning has to do with playing to one's fullest potential. No one's potential is not a fixed entity. It is every-changing, depending on age, emotional maturity, skill development, and physical conditioning. For example, an eleven-year-old boy wrestling his first match ever does not have the same potential to wrestle as a college athlete competing in his fourth NCAA tournament. The role of a coach is to know the difference and prepare each athlete to perform at his or her best on any given day. The most important thing is not who has the most points at the end of a match, but who wrestled to their fullest potential.

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Success is not always determined by the skill of the wrestler, but by the will of the wrestler. "Victory doesn't always go to the better man, but to the one who thinks he can." For as a person thinks within himself, so he is. (says an ancient Hebrew proverb) Many great men of history have been amateur wrestlers: Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, George Patton, and Norman Schwarzokopf (commander of the US Forces in the Persian Gulf War) to name a few. And all of these men would agree, I'm sure, with Coach Dan Gable who said, "More eduringly than any other sport, wrestling teaches self-control and pride. Some have wrestled without great skill; none have wrestled without pride."