In Growing Up in Santa Cruz this month I wrote an article about Positive Impact Wrestling Academy (PIWA). [Read the article here.] This organization is the brainchild of Reggie Roberts, the wrestling coach at Aptos High. When after years of working in substandard facilities he finally got to move his wrestlers into a well-equipped facility, he didn’t just sit back and relax. He decided to start a new academy that would welcome all students in the county – age 7 and up – to learn the positive messages of wrestling.
If you’re like me, wrestling doesn’t stir much “positive impact” in your memories. I don’t even know if my high school had a wrestling team. My main association with wrestling is the story that my mother tells: as a diminutive sorority girl at Cornell University in the fifties, she was often “set up” with wrestlers, because they were short and looking for shorter girls.
She married a six-footer.
But that was the fifties and this is now. I can’t tell you how tall Reggie is (I realize now that I think about it that I don’t often notice people’s heights, possibly because, like my mother, I look up to most people!), but I can tell you about his moral stature. Very high. The man is doing great things for teens.
And a six-year-old.
So here’s the story: I got an e-mail forwarded by the editor of GUISC asking if I’d like to write an article about PIWA. I’m pretty much game to write an article about anything, even if it’s something I know as much about as I know about wrestling. Why the heck not? I answered. I love to learn new things.
Reggie was eager for me to see the PIWA set-up in action. He was thrilled that they had such a great new space, and that alumni, parents, and students had come together to fundraise to buy the necessary equipment that the building bond didn’t fund. And he wanted me to see the teenagers at work, learning wrestling but also learning life skills.
I had both of my kids for the summer, so I dragged them along. They’ve gone to a few interviews this summer, always with good results. (See my interview with Gwynne of local band Zunzun — my kids got to go to a performance for that interview — bonus!)
My son was a bit bored with all the wrestling talk, but my daughter was definitely interested. Reggie invited her out on the mat to learn some moves, but she said no.
I think a few days ago I wrote about not listening to your children….
Within a few days, she was asking about going to the wrestling academy. Life happened, and then today we finally got the chance to drop in. Reggie had said that during the summer some younger kids had been attending, but today there were a group of high school students and… my six-year-old.
Right now they’re doing Judo, so my daughter put on the gi that we’d bought our son when he was six and taking tae kwon do. (That didn’t last. He was constantly getting freaked out by the big room and breaking out in tears!) We went over to Aptos High and without any hesitation, she jumped right in. The instructor, JT from Aptos Martial Arts, and Reggie did stretches. She did stretches. They did somersaults. She did somersaults. They did handstands and rolls. She did something like handstands and nutty six-year-old rolls.
Halfway through the class, I texted my husband: “Our daughter is amazing.”
It just blew me away: Remember, this is a child who can’t follow instructions in a classroom for more than five minutes till she’s had it with instructions and she starts to dance on the table. This is a child who gets annoyed any time someone tells her she’s doing something wrong. A child who gets angry and frustrated if she doesn’t do something exactly right.
Yet there she was, clearly not doing anything much exactly right, having the time of her life…for two solid hours! Since no other small kids were there, when they went into partner exercises, one of the teenagers got on her knees and practiced throws with my daughter. It was adorable to see a six-year-old trying to lift a hefty sixteen-year-old over her shoulder. She didn’t just pretend, though: She was really trying.
The paragraph two before this one is actually not completely fair to her: She doesn’t always respond in those ways to being in classes. She only does that stuff when she isn’t engaged, when the teacher hasn’t figured out how to draw her in and give the exercise meaning. For Reggie, that part of coaching is what it’s all about. I’m sure he coaches wrestling moves in a proper way, but really, what difference does it make to me? What he’s really doing out there is right there in the name:
Positive Impact.
She came home and told her daddy; “And at the end, they all applauded for me.” I think that’s all I have to say.
