What Are Your Goals for This Season?
In case you have not set your goals for this season, it's still not too late. A couple tips for setting your goals for this season, make them specific and measurable, put your dream cap on, measure your progress, and share your goals with your coaches and family.
Make your goals specific and measurable. Rather then say I want to win a lot of matches, say I want to win 50% of my matches on my first year on varsity, or 75% or 90% or 95%. You know your approximate bouts per year, then you can put a number on it. So it might be 40 matches, it might be 35 matches etc. You want to make it measurable so you know if you achieved your end goal.
My goal my Senior year was to qualify for the State Tournament. I'll say more about that goal later. This goal is both specfic and measurable. E.g. I can ask myself and answer whether I achieved this goal.
Put your dream cap on. This is something I really did not do. Or maybe I did, because the previous year I was 20-20-2. So qualifying for the State Tournament in our tough Sectional was probably a dream, but it was not really a big enough dream. Hindsight is 20/20, but maybe my goal should have been to place. But then if I met this goal, I might have said we'll maybe I should have been a State Champ. So why not shoot for the stars and set your goals really high...
Measure your progress. For me, I was making progress, racking up the wins and pins and could tell I was doing the right things. Then I decided I was going to go up to 160 and still had some success. Then I realized I was not a 160 lber and came back down to 152 (after a couple of beatings at 160). If I did not measure my progress, I might have stayed at 160.
Share Your Goals. Put your goals on the mirror in your bathroom, tell your parents, tell your teammates, tell your coaches, tell anyone that will listen.
Don't wait until the end of the season and say what some teammates of mine said to me when they were not wrestling to go down state, "I wish I could be going down state."
This same goal setting can be used if you are looking to go to college or trade school or just about anything else in your life. I set goals for WrestlingGear.Com. And for the most part, we come close to the goals each year (remember about the dreaming big part). It gives us something to work towards...
Good luck this season. Set some goals and work hard towards achieving them.
-Jeff Pape
WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear
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