COMMUNITY ESSAY

My older brother Carter was always one of my biggest role models. He taught me how to tie a fishing line, be tough, and be a good person. He called me out when I was doing wrong and he was always there for me no matter what. I really looked up to him when he wrestled. He was really good and I wanted to be just like him. I was in 5th grade and watching him at the first tournament of the year. He was in a tough wrestling match, tired and probably cutting too much weight. He hit the ground hard, his head was the first thing to touch. He was out cold and came back to reality about 15 seconds later. That was it, his last concussion he could afford before he was forced out of the sport he loved for the sake of his health. He had a lot of potential and he was only a Sophmore when this happened. Only if that last one didn’t happen he could have done great things in the sport, but that wasn’t what was in God's plan for his life.

That is the reality that many wrestlers face. It is such a physical and aggressive sport that head trauma is bound to happen, it’s tougher to deal with than other injuries. When you mess up your knee, shoulder, or elbow typically it will heal and you can return to the mat. But concussions on the other hand, depending on how many you have had and the severity of it, you can be in a daze for weeks, months, years, and they can even change your brain forever. They occur when you fall on your head, get hit in the head, or get severe whiplash and your brain actually bounces off your skull. They cause

dizziness, nausea, brain fog, confusion, memory loss, sensitivity to light and noise, etc. Right after you get your bell rung, you might feel a couple of those symptoms or all of them. Recovery is rough, you feel very out of it, have trouble concentrating on simple tasks, and have bad headaches. To help recover it is important that you hydrate, get enough sleep, avoid too much screen time, and get involved in some light activity like walking. But like I said earlier, sometimes they don’t heal and the concussion can have lasting impacts and in very severe cases lead to brain damage and CTE.

This problem of head trauma doesn’t just affect a small percentage of the population either. Found from a study, nearly 60% of the surveyed D1 wrestlers had reported symptoms of concussions and being hit or falling on their head. One of the bigger prolems of this issue is the under-reporting of this injury. I have seen it lots of times in my own expierience where kids will take a massive blow to the head and you can tell they are majorly affected by it, but then they just continue on like nothing happened. That’s where the danger lies, when you continue on after getting a head injury then get another one while you haven’t recovered from the first one. That makes symptoms more severe and last longer, and that’s also when the more dangerous types of brain trauma can occur.

This past wrestling year I was wrestling someone who wasn’t very good and I underestimated him a lot. We went into the second period and I was winning 7-0. He started on bottom and I was going to let him up because I was going to get a few more easy takedowns then I would’ve teched him (Wining by 15 points). I let him up and then went for a lazy shot. Boom! He throws me right on my head. I fought off my back for almost 2 minutes which felt like an eternity, then I grit out the win. But when the match

was over I could tell something was off. I couldn’t see straight and was very nauseous, so I sprinted to the garbage and threw up, I’d never done that after a match before. Then I was sitting around on the ground for probably close to an hour and I remember I couldn’t get my thoughts straight and was just in a daze. My Dad came up to me, “You good bud?” He always knew how I was feeling even if I tried to hide it as well as I could. He was there for me as a coach for my whole high school career, those were some of my favorite memories ever with him in my corner. “Yeah Dad I’m good, just a little gassed.” I knew something was wrong but I was never going to tell him, even if he already knew. This is where the problem occurs. I ignored my symptoms and went on to wreslte the rest of the tournament. I wrestled like crap but still got the win, luckily I didn’t take any other major hits to the head or who knows what could’ve happened. I struggled with headaches and nausea for the rest of the season. Me and my teammates have had many scenarios like this. That’s what makes these injuries so dangerous is how easliy they can go un-reported. This also wraps into the grit of wrestlers. The fear of not doing enough to reach my goals haunted me so bad I didn’t tell anyone about it, and I feel that’s the same for many other wrestlers whether that’s head injuries or other ones.

When you continue to go hard after an injury it can lead to things that may affect you for the rest of your life. Wreslters carry this passion and determination about them that I have found is very rare in today's world. The willingness to put it all on the line for your dreams. It’s a passion that is carved deep into our souls by relentless work being put in every single day. For me pushing through that concussion wasn’t even a second thought. Not because I'm so “tough” or anything like that, but because that drive in my soul that came from putting in so much work. It is ingrained in us. The will to keep on

going even when it gets rocky is something that I would say most wrestlers I have interacted with have the ability to do better than other people I encounter. Grit is a great quality to have but it also might be the reason wrestlers don’t report their concussions and keep trying to push through which makes it worse and hurts them in the long run.

This problem would be impossible to get rid of completely because of the physicality of the sport, but there are rules and regulations that try to contain the worsening of concussions. Concussion protocol is a set of guidelines that regulates athletes after they get a concussion until they are ready for play again. They give you a timeline based on how bad your concussion is, give you light exercises to start doing to help with recovery, monitor your practices after you return to practice, educate you on how to identify symptoms, and then help guide you to get medical clearance to return to your sport. There are also specific rules in collegiate wrestling that make it so you can’t slam your opponents too hard when you are doing a mat return or takedown, but it is up to the ref's discretion. The ref can call potentially dangerous if he feels like the situation has the possibility of ending in injury. Also some moves that are legal in other styles of wrestling aren’t legal in collegiate wrestling like certain types of throws and other things that can lead to injury. There are also some devices that are used to help prevent concussions. All wrestlers have to wear head gear which just covers your ears, but there is a type of headgear that also has padding on front of your head, top of head, and back of your head. With the padding on the ears as well, your head is pretty covered up with the concussion head gear and you’re less likely to get a concussion from a hit or fall on your head.

With all these things to help control this problem it is still very tough to come up with a really strong way to prevent concussions. I think a way that might need to be implemented is a rule change where everyone needs to wear the concussion headgear, then for the engineers of that headgear to go back to the lab and try to make changes to make it stronger, more cushion, sleek, and cooler designs. This would make it to where people would actually want to wear it and enjoy wearing it. Maybe some rule changes on certain potentially dangerous moves to be banned. But I think the most important thing that the wreslting community can do is spread awareness about this issue. If more people know about the problems concussions can have on a person, then I think the stigma of “toughing it out” would maybe start to go away because of how serious it can truly be. No matter how tough you seem or how many trophies you win, if your brain can’t function properly your quality of life will go down majorly.