Michele Weldon | January 13, 2012
It’s Friday night and I am in a Coralville, Iowa hotel room, a little weary from the four-hour drive from Chicago west on 88 and then even west-er on 80, past texting truck drivers and horizontal snow winds, miles of empty ice-dusted fields and about 1,000 signs for Subway. I just finished putting six turkey, cheese and spinach sandwiches I made this morning and about a gallon of Vitamin Water in the small humming refrigerator for Colin to eat tomorrow after the weigh-ins for the Iowa City West quad against Apple Valley and Marmion.
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Michele Weldon | December 30, 2011
I know we are all supposed to be above this kind of thing. We are not gloat. We are in it for the challenge and the discipline of the sport. But oh my, it is one of the 10 best feelings in the world when your son has his hand raised in victory in a [...]
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Michele Weldon | November 16, 2011
In the stands every wrestling season since 2004 I have had plenty of anxiety attacks about what work I needed to do once I got home, what I needed to get accomplished for the house or for life, how to keep all the pins juggling in the air. But it was always worth it to go, spend most of the day in a gym wearing the orange and the blue just to see what splendor my sons could create. And it was splendid, even if the gym smelled bad and the other parents were sometimes hostile and some kids cried when they lost.
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Caryn Brooks | November 14, 2011
Coaches know what a 17 or 18-year-old wrestler cares about. They play to hopes and dreams of championships and gold medals. On one official visit the coaches were sure to take a route that passed the outdoor pool with hot tubs and a waterfall at the rec center. It was an especially warm weekend at the end of August and plenty of young women were working on their tans while wearing very little.
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Michele Weldon | August 2, 2011
Many of us who are members of the Huskies Wrestling Family have been watching Ellis Coleman for years, since he was an eighth grader member of the Little Huskies. And here he is, a 2009 graduate of Oak Park-River Forest High School, this week making this crazy flying squirrel Ellis move that landed him on the home page of Yahoo, ESPN and so many sites.
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Michele Weldon | July 10, 2011
As wrestling parents we all make hard choices. My children, especially Sam, have been given amazing opportunities because of wrestling. I would like to be there as they take advantage of those things, but it’s not always possible.
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Michele Weldon | July 5, 2011
See for yourself in this video why being on this team with this coach is an extraordinary experience for the young men on the team, including all three of my sons. Coach Powell talks about the coaches, the Oak Park-River Forest High School Huskies wrestling team, recent 2010 grad Charlie Johnson, and how any man can be extraordinary. Listen to senior Brian Toldeo talk about how wrestling changed his life. Watch Chris Ellis embrace Coach Powell. And maybe you can understand why it is about much more than wrestling.
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Michele Weldon | June 29, 2011
Speaking of off-season work ethic, Coach Mike Powell is in San Diego with some of the team training with the Vista wrestlers for a week of twice a day wrestling practices. Colin is there and working hard. The Vista wrestlers come to Oak Park in two weeks to train here.
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Michele Weldon | June 19, 2011
The truth is many men need to step up to their responsibilities. It is not a class issue, a race issue or even a generational issue. It is a human rights issue.
Today my oldest son forwarded me an email from the head of a much bigger household. Barack Obama, himself raised by a single mother in the absence of a father, writing from the White House.
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Michele Weldon | May 7, 2011
For a few years when the boys were small I went out to eat on Mother’s Day with them, paid the hefty brunch prices and basked in the boys’ adoration, even if they did keep asking the waiter to refill the bread basket so many times he was deeply annoyed. I felt as a single [...]
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