Summer Programming 2020
August 2020
On July 23, Wrestling to Beat the Streets DC concluded our Throwdown Thursday series with a recap of the summer. Looking back on the past weeks, one athlete remarked, “I can’t wait for Thursdays to see my wrestling buddies at Wrestling to Beat the Streets DC.” Our speaker series saw a wide variety of current and former athletes address wrestlers from across DC at a time when in-person training was not a possibility.
The stories and advice shared by our invited speakers struck a chord with our wrestlers. Topics ranged from technical advice to goal-setting guidance and encouragement to stay on track in school. Our speakers shared stories about highlights from their careers, but also the struggles that it often took to be successful. As one athlete put it, “one theme I saw across all of our speakers was that they all had to overcome adversity—every one had a story of when something was hard and they had to persevere.”
Our weekly sessions started with a workout check-in to log activity from the previous week. In all, our athletes and coaches tallied more than 12,000 pushups, over 11,000 sit-ups, and nearly 500 miles run or biked over just short of three months.
While this was not the summer any of us planned, we at Wrestling to Beat the Streets DC were happy to be able to offer camaraderie, shared wisdom, and a little taste of wrestling to our athletes’ weeks this summer. Our complete list of speakers was as follows:
Teague Moore, Head Coach at American University
Kizhan Clarke, American University
David Terao, All-American at American University
Dylan Foley and Kevin Bratlan, Coaches at the US Coast Guard Academy
Mike Clayton, Manager of Coaches Education at USA Wrestling
Clay Steadman, Penn State
Nate Jackson, Assistant Coach at Princeton
Carissa Gump, 2008 Olympian in Weightlifting
Ryan Hall, MMA Fighter and World Champion in BJJ
Elijah Murphy, Billie Jean King Youth Leadership award winner from American University
Rickey Torrence, Head Coach at Washington Latin