Back from the Nome Wrestling Invitational

My wrestling team this year consists of about 8 middle schoolers (2 of them are girls!) and Bart, my high schooler. Bart and I took off for Nome on Friday during the school day, which was strange because our flight got delayed and I was able to observe my own class being taught by a sub for a few hours. It was a little awkward but now I know how to leave better sub plans. Bart weighed in at 152.4 lbs when we arrived in Nome and even though he hadn't eaten the night before, he needed to be under 152 lbs to wrestle in his weight class. I had him running around the school and sucking on lemon drops to lose a little of the weight. After an hour, he weighted in at 151 lbs! But 10 minutes later, during the coaches' meeting, everyone decided that the 152 lb and 160 lb weight classes should be combined for the tournament. He had dropped all of that weight for nothing, and then lost to two 160 lb guys almost back to back in a double-elimination tournament. He was out of the tournament, so.....



That night we hit up the Nome grocery store and dropped 30 bucks on straight up junk food. Junk food has a very medicinal effect on mood sometimes. One of the wrestling coaches from Nome, Leiudell, invited us to stay at his place for the tournament, so when we combined Pop-Rocks mixed with Rockstar, we called them a Leiudell special. Bart thought it was strange to see a teacher drinking energy drinks.

The next day, Leiudell let us borrow his old truck to bum around Nome. Bart must have had 3 foot-long subs from Subway throughout the day, and it was very nostalgic for me to buy gas.



The nostalgia ended when the bill came. $4.29 a gallon!



Thankfully, Bart got to wrestle in two exhibition matches Saturday night in the 152 lb weight class. He pinned the first wrestler from Noorvik in the first round and had a tough battle against a Chevak wrestler for his second round.



I kept yelling during the match, "PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON HIM!!! GET HIS HEAD DOWN!! WRESTLE!! WRESTLE!!! GET HIM!!!" and Bart got fired up. Even though I was just shouting out random bits of wrestling advice, it seems to help! The score was 10-10 with 15 seconds to go and I yelled, "TAKE HIM DOWN!! 5 seconds left!!!" and Bart got a sweet double leg takedown with 3 seconds left on the clock. Final score, 12-10, winner = Bart!

We celebrated his victory by seeing the new Resident Evil movie at the theater in town. It's a pretty dang good scary-apocalypse-action-zombie flick! Unfortunately, after we left the theater I wanted to run over anybody I saw in Nome because I thought they might be a zombie. Coupled with the fact that there are icy roads and a lot of bars in Nome (people stagger sort of zombie-ish down the main "front" street), I had to drive very carefully back to Leiudell's house.



Overall, it was a great trip with lots of good wrestling and fun in Nome. Coming back to Shaktoolik, you can see the ice encroaching on the Shaktoolik River. And it snowed last night...



Still need clear the snow on the porch!