I’ve been watching quite a bit of high school wrestling over recent weeks.

This is not because I’m particularly knowledgeable about the sport. A decade in central Pennsylvania taught me one or two legendary names—Kerry Kolat comes to mind—and that Oklahoma, Iowa and the Keystone state are wrestling hotbeds. In fact, we broadcast meets live when I worked at WRSC-AM. Hearing our play by play guy scream “he anticipated the fireman and was able to counter with a half nelson” or some such merely baffled me.

Yes, I also recognized a long time ago that some of us just don’t look good in singlets.

But there is something honestly inspiring about the sport. Like any other athletic endeavor, it is physical and demanding. Victory depends on focus, timing, ability and strength, but also that inscrutable combination of tactics, impulse and sheer luck.

In this it can be compared to football or basketball. Like golf or boxing, the participant is alone in an arena, with all eyes able to see strengths, weaknesses and mistakes—there’s no hiding in a crowd, no relief pitcher to save you from a few bad decisions or a moment of fatigue.

When you get tired in a match, Kimball freshman Rowdy Keller told me, “you just have to trust your conditioning.”

That’s another way of condensing months of running, weight training, diet, coaching and personal mettle into a simple phrase—again something familiar to all athletes in all forms of sport...even spectating from the couch, with the exception of the running, weight and diet parts.

Of course, bourbon and barbecue potato chips could be considered a diet.

What fascinates me about wrestling is what goes on around the mat, rather than on it. First of all, the athletes spend a lot of time contemplating. They often sit quietly, looking at nothing, scrolling mentally through everything they’ve learned, every error they’ve made. They do this without bluster, without blame, without celebration, without fooling themselves about their standing. Instead, they seek inside themselves for one notch of personal improvement at a time.

The effort pays off in a rare kind of confident humility. David Gifford of Banner County recently laughed at himself after a difficult match for misreading his opponent. “He’s a lot stronger than he looked,” the young man chuckled.

Yeah, he got the worst of it—lesson learned.

In between matches, the wrestlers can often be seen huddling with each other. Quietly one will lean his head in and tell the other to keep his or her head up, to concentrate. One may point to an opponent across the way and point out to another that “you’ll probably face him in the third round and he likes to....”

Can’t finish the sentence; their jargon escapes me.

So even though these athletes are thrown into an arena, one on one, exposed to the world, there’s a strong and caring bond—one as powerful as on any team.

There’s something in the sport beyond winning and losing. At Ogallala on Saturday, Kimball coach Mike Mitchell told me his guys wrestled their best in the dual where they lost—on the board—by a lopsided score, something like 54-0. He saw the effort, the determination and the ‘almosts.’ And those things mattered.

One more thing: I see Mitchell and other coaches offer encouragement before and after matches to opponents. “Good job,” “keep it up,” “get ‘em next time, I’m sure of it,” they will say.

In the Mark Harris’ novel, Bang the Drum Slowly—as well as in the 1970s film of the same name famous as one of Robert DeNiro’s first appearances on the big screen—the fictional “author,” Henry Wiggen, discovers just how good each person can become at their trade when comrades, acquaintances and teammates offer encouragement instead of debilitating barbs.

For me, watching the kids wrestle—or, rather, watching the events off the mat that are just as important—is an uplifting experience.

I’m just glad I never had to wear those uniforms.