9 years ago I started following the local middle school wrestling team because my kids were coming up through the program. (I have 10 kids so it will still be several more years before I'm done sending kids through the program.)

I was getting tired of seeing some of these kids work their guts out and then have zero success as a team. Giving up 5-7 forfeits a match and trying to dig out of a 30-42 point deficit was just not in the cards. For several years I saw adequate to great capabilities with the coaching staff and some amazing individual wrestlers. But the constant team beat downs led to apathy and even the really good wrestlers ended up quitting before they were done with HS because they didn't have team mates. (The multiple forfeits and very few wins as a team ended up extending on to HS for them.)

This school was really good at wrestling when it opened and in fact over an 8 year span had 6 top 3 finishes in the conference (3 seconds and 3 thirds). The last one was in 2004.

I always was told by others that this middle school (and HS) WAS good in wrestling but I didn't see it. For 7 years I watched them get handled. In all that time I saw ONE dual meet win for the middle school. One year when my daughter was a starter for the team they were all set to end the dual in a tie and the celebration among the team and parents was already ramping up as they had a couple forfeits yet to approach the mat to claim. Then the heavy weight wrestler of the other team comes to the center of the mat with out his head gear strapped on. The referee made 4 different comments asking him in different ways if he was sure he was ready to present himself to receive a forfeit. When he confirmed all 4 times that he was he raised his hand giving them 6 points and the tie and then raised his own hand to penalize them one team point for not being ready to wrestle. Wow pandemonium for those kids that night. They hung their hat on that win for 4 more years

In the mean time I was coaching with the youth club in town and often couldn't even get those wrestlers to go out for the middle school team and the response was "why would I want to be a part of a losing team"

My assumptions started to be that these kids were not responsive to the revolving doors of coaches they had. Even if talented/knowledgeable they had a new set every year. Every year there was a different way to teach moves, a different set of terminology, no clue what the kids could or could not do and a total restart on "their style". In one year they had a guy hired - have the parent meeting kicking off the season and then got hired as an assistant at the HS and took it instead. Everyone seemed to be using it as a stepping stone and things seemed would never get better. Also the kids didn't seem to behave very well for the coaches and showed a lot of disrespect and then when disciplined would just quit...

I started to wonder if I wanted to send my younger kids to be on the team. After all I was starting to think myself if I wanted them to be a part of a losing team.

In the begging of this 10 year stretch I worked in an office 60+ miles away and drove to and from work every day. Usually barely giving me time to make it to the meets or to youth practice. About 4 years ago I started working virtually and I didn't have to stress as much getting to my kids activities.

I started to think about throwing my hat in the ring to help out at the middle school as well to lend my talents and maybe sustain some consistency but they practice from 3:20-5:20 and my work day wasn't scheduled to be done until 4pm. And as a salaried manager of an IT Operations team schedules rarely mean anything and you work beyond that frequently.

I also didn't need the measly amount of money a middle school coach gets paid as I had a good job. But if I did get involved I certainly wouldn't be looking for a coaching promotion at the HS or a teaching job out of district. I couldn't do a coaching job at the HS right now. They are busy every Saturday from early Dec through the end of February. These are the same days my younger kids go to tournaments so we can NOT go to tournaments on Sunday and try to keep the Sabbath holy. So middle school with dual meets M-Th and one tournament on a Saturday to end the year fits my family life a bit more as well. So the wheels were turning on the topic but I just didn't think it could happen.

Then I had a daughter announce she was going on a mission followed by a second daughter announce that she also was going on a mission and now all of a sudden that measly check would pay for 4.5 months of one of my daughter's missions. But work was too stressful - always too busy - I didn't have the time - but I did have a need.

I prayed about how we'd pay for these surprises as we hadn't put away money for our girls to serve. I felt strongly that I should approach my boss about a shift change for those 3 months that we would practice/compete but I needed to lay the ground work. I talked to key members of my work team that had expressed interest in being future leaders. I mentioned that I was wanting to seek this kind of shift change and in order to do it I would have to have their support. I talked about how it could be leveraged as a proving ground for future job growth/responsibilities. I had their support, I felt I had my Heavenly Father's support and so I went to seek the support of my boss.

Premise - I shift my schedule for 3 months to 6:30am-3pm instead of the usual 7:30am-4pm. I leverage that extra hour in the morning to meet more frequently directly with my off shore team. I have a senior lead every day of the 3 months available for anything that occurs after 3pm up until I'm available again for escalations at night. And I use that to groom future leaders...

He agreed to let me give it a try.

Our first year as a team we found more success than the previous 8 years as we beat our cross town rival to start the season for our first legitimate dual meet win but then lost to them at the end of the year in our 2nd dual. We came closer to a few of the other teams in our conference during the dual season and we scored more points as a team at conference than the previous 3 years combined. We had much fewer forfeits and were competitive. During the year as I talked to the team about "when I'm back next year we're going to do this or that" I had kids raise their hand and actually say "do you mean we CAN have the same coach from year to year?" I was floored but this confirmed my suspicion that kids just didn't feel cared about by the administration or previous coaching staffs and there fore didn't put their best forward or bother to even come back.

Year one was by all accounts a success - now wondering if year 2 would even happen.

The week after the season ended in 2014 my boss sets up a special meeting with me and I'm dreading that it is something about him not wanting to let me coach again. Instead he lets me know that he was impressed with how things worked and that there was another team that was struggling with development of associates and their manager was taking a different role and instead of hiring a new manager they wanted me to merge the entire team into my team. Cool sounds like a promotion to me - especially since one of them was not just a "lead" but had a manager title. I'll take it....

Then he tells me that it won't actually be a promotion at that time as we were in the final stages of annual merits and giving extra money for promotion to me would lower everyone else's merit and I had to wait. And he also said so you basically will start doing all the work and prove you deserve it and if we think you are doing well enough with it we'll look into it mid year. So all the work but no title or money

It took about 6 hours for me to ponder the whole extra work thing, etc and then all of a sudden I realized I may be just like all those other coaches and not have time to come back for the kids on the wrestling team.

I assessed the staff I'd be gaining and identified the top people. I then let them know of my desire to go back to coach the next year and that in my opinion management would not let me do it if we were not showing extremely good progress on merging our teams. We got to work at a crazy speed. Always including my former leads with these new leads getting their ideas and buy-in worked wonders for us to impress management.

So I wanted to gauge my position and so I started asking when they would look into that merit increase. They said they wanted my new manager to be hired (major org changes) before they did that. Then he was hired and they told me they wanted him to get his feet on the ground first and learn the lay of the land....after a while I then had 2 separate meetings with him where I laid out our progress of merging the teams. I mentioned to him that I intended to be done enough that he would allow me to coach again and for him to do the merit/promotion. Honestly at that point I mostly cared about coaching again.

Finally they got me a raise 2 days before the systems were all frozen in preparation for the next merit cycle and they approved me to coach again - or in his words if your previous boss (his new peer - but senior to him) allowed it he'd let it go for one more year and form his own opinion. Well this made me happy.

So on to year 2 of the system I was implementing. The other coach on the staff from the year before went from being a substitute teacher in our district to having a full time job in Chicago so he wasn't coming back. That was alright though because it was my system/terminology we were implementing and I at least kept some consistency for the kids. This year during dual season we had a full roster with a lot of returning wrestlers almost the whole way through. We beat our cross town rival both times (first time 88-18, second time 66-36), we beat another conference team 82-24 (that team actually is 2 MS combined now - one of them was the team we beat in the tie/win a few years before). We lost by 6 and 7 points to two other teams and got handled by the top team in the conference...

With academic eligibility, injury and others just not wanting to continue on to the conference tournament we still filled 16 of the 19 weight classes at the conference tournament and did well enough during the season that we had 14 of our wrestlers get seeded. The kids wrestled hard today and a couple placed higher than their seed while about 5 ended up finishing lower than their seed. As a team we took 3rd place. Our point total was 3 points away from equaling the total points scored by our team in the last 5 conference tournaments combined. And as the assistant coach and I reflected on it afterwards we noted that less than half of the points scored were by our soon to be departing 8th graders.

Even though both of my daughters will be home from their missions before the next season starts (don't need the money) and the fact that I won't have a son on the team next year I sure hope I'll get to come back as my next son in line will be a part of the team the year after that and my youngest is in 1st grade so if things work out each year with my employer I may be able to be there with this team for the next 7 years that I'll have kids feeding into it.

With our development and success at the middle school in these two years I sincerely hope that these kids continue on all the way through HS and that at that level they can stop having the 5-6 forfeits per meet and start winning at that level again as well.

So proud of our kids. Especially one that was kicked off the team (as a 6th grader) with his brother last year during the week leading up to the conference tournament for disciplinary problems not getting opportunities to represent the team, earn an individual honor (or score team points). This kid is experienced and talented but still tested his bounds on discipline a few times this year but also was at times a leader and extra coach in the room. He became a champion today placing higher than his seed. His older brother that moved on to HS this year was kicked off the HS wrestling team for discipline problems and is in the process of possibly being expelled for attacking some students in the hall way. I took an opportunity on the bus to talk to him personally about how proud I was of him and how he could continue to have great success making his own path and not following his brothers antics.

Alright - I'm sure this will get a bunch of TL;DR comments and a lot may not care but I share anyway - now back to praying about what I need to do at my real job to be afforded the opportunity by them to go back and coach next year.

(I hope my putting this together flowed and was consistent and when I went back to add details I didn't flub it all up)