The Jeff Jordan Team Camp was a huge success as the team spent 5 days wrestling, sleeping, and eating, in that order. A typical day was a 7:15 two mile wake-up run on the clock, followed by breakfast, then a two hour technique session. After lunch it was another two hour wrestling session. All two hour sessions ended with a hard drill of the techniques learned and layered to flow into the Jordan system and a hard set of push-ups. After the "home cooked" dinner each evening was a two-hour live session of straight one and two minute goes. This was very intense.
All of our workouts, meals, and rest occurred in the Concord Community Center, which is basically taking Park School and putting it out in a corn field. We set up camp on the mats each night, ate our meals in the cafeteria behind the gym stage, and basically eliminated most distractions that you have at other camps. This was a true to the words "training camp". The most impressive thing about the facility was the geothermal cooling. When it was in the 80's outside, it was very cool inside making it very good for rest and recovery.
There were teams from Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia in attendance with us, about 60-70 wrestlers in all. The other teams were a great fit for our kids for drilling and live wrestling, and their coaches were friendly and willing to share ideas with us.
Our seven kids who attended the 14 day JRob in PA really handled the challenge well. The roller coaster park at Cedar Point helped to recharge their batteries a little and although their bodies were beat up from the two weeks of training, they stayed focused on the techniques and went hard when it was time to go.
The clinicians were outstanding. Coaches Jordan, Ryan, and Lang used common language, built on the Graham system, and drilled the kids the same way day in and out. The final night was a drill session where the kids covered all the techniques in a sequential order. Thanks to the steady hand of Coach McDaniel Jr. we have about 20 hours of technique, drilling, and live wrestling on video that we have been dissecting and studying the past few weeks. The kids have continued to drill these skills since we have come home.
Our other stop was to the Overtime School of Wrestling in Naperville, Illinois. Their world class instructors, Sean Bormet, John Kading, and Kerry Bowmans put us through a two-hour workout on the
Friday morning before the Brewer game. You can check their awesome facility out on their website.
Overall, the summer camp experience was very good. But camps are a lot like like tools, some are cheap and you don't get as much out of them, and some are built to last but sit on a shelf and do not provide a return on the investment. With these experiences in our rear-view mirror, we need to include what we've learned into our present and future. The JRob, Jordan, and Overtime experiences are the highest quality tools we can have in our box, but we need to use them correctly and often for them to have any long term value.
