One of the final touches of Holmen's Wrestling Room:
https://fb.watch/dhhx2LVEgH/ (https://fb.watch/dhhx2LVEgH/)
Some wrestling coaches like their wrestling rooms closed tight and only for use of the wrestling team. When we were designing our wrestling room in Holmen, we took a different approach. We wanted to bring as many people as possible into our room on a daily basis in hopes of intriguing more people to try wrestling. We wanted students to throw dummies in PE class, see the banners and record boards. Most importantly we wanted students to see how important wrestling was to our school and community. In return we got an awesome physical education space and an utterly impressive wrestling facility. This suspended ninja warrior course is one of the final pieces that makes Holmen Wrestling's room unique. The video above is our first day using the course last week.
I will attempt to answer a few questions here as many who have already seen the video have reached out...
- Our wrestling room was built two years ago after passing a referendum.
- Our current wrestling room has 5 full mats and 6 full circles
- The room is a completely new addition paid for by referendum money (the referendum was 21.5 million and included lots of athletic updates and renovations to common spaces, new FAC, and new tech ed)
- The ninja warrior course was part of the referendum and built and installed by a company
- The ninja warrior course has 6 lanes each of varying difficulty. Your forearms and abs are cashed after using it
- The ninja course gets raised after use and stays in tact
- The referendum money supplied us the spring floor, the mats, the wall mats, and ninja course. All other equipment in the room was funded by Holmen wrestling through fund raising
- Holmen MS practices at this facility as well so it is actually undersized ;D (60 plus HS boys, 20 plus HS girls, 40 plus MS)
I mainly share this information with you, to help improve our wrestling facilities around the state. Lux-Casco and Holmen rooms will not be the largest very long and that's a great thing. Let's keep growing wrestling. Get your ADs out to see some of the newer rooms being built when you get a referendum or new school so rooms like this are the standard not the dream. Tying curriculum into our space allowed us to gain community and school support (sometimes we have to think outside the box). The wrestling families got the referendum in our school moving by flooding a few school board meetings. To gain community support outside of just wrestling, we leaned on making the referendum about all areas such as band, theatre, PE, lunch program, green house, weight room, etc to make sure everyone in our community had a reason to say yes to the referendum. We used events like trick or treating, parades, and home sporting events to lobby for future plans and gain support. We made it all or none and passed with flying colors. I know this won't be the blueprint for each community but I hope it sparks some ideas or maybe even some drive to push for something better in the future. Good luck and let me know if I can be of assistance in your future journeys.