Grapplers to hold camp this week
Current and future Warren County grapplers will have the opportunity this week to learn the skills to take the Pioneer wrestling program to the next level.
The Warren County Wrestling Camp will be held Tuesday through Saturday, from 8:30-11:30 a.m. each day, at the Warren County Middle School gym.
The camp will be for ages 5-17, at a cost of $25 per wrestler. It is being held by WCMS coach Jeff Watson and Dave Holcomb, who has worked as a coach with both the varsity and middle school squads in recent seasons.
“This started when some of the parents approached me at the middle school last year, wanting to keep them involved in the sport, and it’s kind of grown from there,” Holcomb said. “Coach Watson and I kept talking about it, and we hope this will be a way to get the younger kids in and get them interested in the sport.”
Although an original deadline of June 10 was set for registering for the camp, Holcomb noted anyone wishing to participate is still welcome to do so, and may register before Tuesday morning’s session.
“We’re not going to turn any kid away who wants to be a wrestler,” he said. “Right now we’ve got from second grade through 10th and 11th grade, and we’re looking at 23 or 24 kids, which for a first-year camp, I’m really pleased with those numbers. But there is still room for more kids if they’re interested in coming out.”
The camp’s three-hour sessions will cover all the basics, beginning on Tuesday with an explanation of the rules and scoring system of the sport and an introduction to takedowns. Wednesday and Thursday will cover wrestling from both the bottom and top referee positions, and Friday’s session will work on counters and pinning combinations before tying everything together on the final day.
In addition to Watson and Holcomb, new varsity coach Matt Turner and several other previous Pioneer wrestlers are planning to be on hand to help work with the young athletes.
“Brian Matheny, who wrestled here and coached with the varsity last year, has talked about coming to work the camp, and former wrestlers Nathan Shack and Jase Bouldin are going to try to be here, too,” Holcomb said. “We’re also hoping that J.T. Martin, the first-ever state medalist from Warren County, is going to be able to come in on Friday and Saturday to work with the campers.
“We’re trying to bring back some of the older wrestlers, to get them back involved with helping build the program, because we want to put it back in the direction it was a couple of years ago.
“We were pretty dominant in the past, and were even ranked in the top 25 in the state at one point, which is pretty impressive. And we’d like to see the program get back up there. It gives an opportunity for us, too, to see how many kids are involved in the sport, where maybe in a a couple of years we can start looking at starting a youth program.”
The WCMS program took fourth place in its 12-team division last season, a finish Holcomb said was particularly impressive due to the fact wrestlers in Warren County are exposed to the sport at a much later age than in some surrounding communities.
“We’re starting at sixth grade, and still competing with good programs,” he said. “So it would be interesting to see where we’d be if we started as young as some of these other communities. I think we’ve got the athletes in Warren County, it’s just a matter of getting them involved and keeping them interested in it.”
For more information on the camp, contact Holcomb at 668-4950 or Watson at 473-0842.