JONES COLUMN, Continued from page 26
mean to under-wrestle your lead, position, or hold. What does that mean? It means that sometimes when a wrestler goes on defense he basically stops wrestling. Don’t do that. Always look to improve your position, gain on your opponent inch-by-inch defensively and when your opponent takes too big of a risk or makes a mistake, make him pay by scoring on him with counter offense.
How does this apply to folkstyle? Ask Jake Herbert, Brent Metcalf, Cael Sanderson or Jordan Burroughs. Ask them how many times in college they had a one-point lead with 15 seconds to go?
In five years, probably less than you can count on one hand. But in freestyle it happened to each of them five times in one tournament day.
Why? Because freestyle has period reset. Freestyle is a series of two-minute matches and it’s hard to build a large point lead when the period is only two minutes long. Often, you are only winning or losing by one or two points with 30 seconds left.
But wait, think about folkstyle. Often, most matches are blowouts and so defense doesn’t apply but think about the toughest, most important bouts you’ve had, the ones you really want to win.
What are they? It’s not the bouts you blow someone out 15-0,
it’s the matches that are 1-0 with 20 seconds to go. It’s the 9-8 match with 10 seconds to go. The tough ones! It’s the one-point matches, the match coming down to the wire and you’re wrestling well. It’s also often the most important bout of your day or of your season and it’s going to be hard to win. No blowout this time. You’re ahead by a point with 10 seconds to go - what are you going to do?
Have superior defense!
WHAT IS THE WORLD’S APPROACH ON DEFENSE? The World views defense differently than America. Foreigners view defense as, “I’ve scored my points, I’m beating you, why do I need to keep scoring? With short time on the clock, I’ll just defend to beat you.” Or just like American football, when a team is ahead 35-0 why should it be required to keep scoring? Because a team is win- ning by a lot they are now going into a defensive posture to maintain their lead and to kill the clock.
Russians and Iranian wrestlers place a high value on stopping your attacks and enjoy the mentality of, “I’m winning and I dare you to try to score on me. You can’t score on me, try.” This makes them feel superior to you. They believe if they can score on you, take the lead, and then swat away your best offensive attempts, they are dominating you. They believe the best wrestler is the complete wrestler - the one that can score and defend. They look at Americans as good offensively, but weak defen-
sively. They believe they are superior to us because they can do both and we can only do one. This is what they believe. It begs the question. Is offense more important than defense? Sure, but defense has its place. It also depends on the technical and tactical make-up of your country. From the point’s efficiency standpoint, in order for America to improve its overall scoring efficiency, we must reprioritize our training time to add more defensive training minutes. Also, one more point to make. How are we losing at the Cadet and Junior World level? The same way we are losing at the Senior level. Yes, we are scoring but we are not defending at the age-
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WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS ANALYSIS Points Efficiency
(Points scored for/against per minute)
1. Azerbaijan 1.31/.51; 2. Kazakhstan 1.12/.51; 3. Russia .86/.30; 4. Iran .93/.41; 5. Georgia 1.01/.53; 6. United States 1.12/.71; 7. Belarus .80/.41; 8. Japan 1.04/.75
Points scored per minute
1. Azerbaijan 1.31; 2. United States 1.12 and Kazakhstan 1.12; 4. Japan 1.04; 5. Georgia 1.01; 6. Bulgaria .98; 7. Iran .93; 8. Russia .86 Points allowed per minute
1. Russia .30; 2. Iran and Belarus .41; 4. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan .51; 6. Georgia .53; 7. Turkey .55; 8. Ukraine .63; 9. United States .71
group level.
This tells us that we need to tweak the American curriculum and how we teach wrestling at all age groups. Conclusion for Every American Wrestler Total wrestling efficiency, both offense and defense of wrestling, are important. As American wrestlers, we certainly have an aggressive, attacking mentality and it helps us win at every level. America has always won with offense and always will. This is our style, our top strategy, and we will not deviate from it. We must stay on the attack and impose our will on our opponents. We always wrestle a physical style with an empha- sis on conditioning and when we are on the offense, we score points, and it leads us to victories.
In my mind, domination is scoring at will and being stingy on defense. I’ve witnessed several of Americas best wrestlers come out of college and wrestle on the world stage. Metcalf, Herbert, Jake Varner and Tervel Dlagnev all came out of college as offensive machines.
When they graduated, they learned quickly that adding a solid defense was important and to truly dominate, you must score at will and never get scored on. They’ve all made significant improvement in their defense and that has moved them closer to the total wrestler. We now need American coaches and younger wrestlers to make it important. We’ve been long taught, in America, that your best defense is a good offense. That’s an incorrect statement. Your best defense is a good defense. Because we know this, now every National Team practice is spent on defensive improvement, both technically and tactically. If you look at the typical daily American training plan, we put a majority of time into offense development. Now is the time to start training defense. It’s ok, don’t feel bad, if you want to be the best in the World or win the close match, you better get on it now. These are the top defensive areas of concentration for the U.S. wrestlers: 1. Mentality
2.Stance 3.Head Blocking Opponents Shot 4. Controlling the Tie Up 5.Leg Defense 6. Clinch Defense 7. Edge of the Mat 8. Defensive Tactics In the next issue of USA Wrestler, I will discuss the specifics of these eight areas in detail.
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