The Late-Summer Question We Hear From Wrestling Families

Tuesday night, six o'clock, and most of Riverside is still cooling off from the day's heat. Our Youth NoGi and Wrestling class fills in anyway — no gi jackets sticking to sweaty backs tonight, just rashguards, shorts, and a room full of kids scrambling for position. It's one of our favorite classes to walk past this time of year, because you'll see a six-year-old and a fourteen-year-old working the exact same skill a few feet apart.

We get a version of the same question most Julys, usually from a dad standing at the front desk with a middle-schooler in tow: "He wrestles for the school team in the winter — is there anything worth doing now?" And every year the answer's the same. Summer is actually the better time to start, not the leftover time.

Here's why. Once a school season opens, coaches don't have six weeks to teach a kid to move on the mat, run a full practice, and get them ready for a tournament, all at the same time. Kids who show up already comfortable scrambling, already understanding base and weight distribution, spend the season improving instead of catching up to everyone else on the roster.

What the class actually builds

Our Youth NoGi and Wrestling class is open to kids six and up, and it runs Tuesday and Thursday at 6 PM. It's built around takedowns, scrambles, and live positional work — the kind of reps that build real mat sense instead of a handful of memorized moves. Coach Benjamin Frietze leads it, and if you haven't met him yet, he wrestled competitively for twelve years at the state and national level before he ever stepped onto a jiu-jitsu mat. He's coaching from real mat time, not a manual.

The crossover surprises people

What catches a lot of parents off guard is how much this class feeds into our BJJ program too. A kid who spends a summer learning to fight for an underhook and finish a takedown tends to pick up jiu-jitsu positions faster, because both sports really come down to the same question: who controls the hips. We don't push kids to pick one over the other early. Plenty of our strongest students train both.

We also hear from parents who worry a room full of scrambling kids will get too rough. In practice it goes the other way. Live wrestling with a coach watching every rep teaches control before it teaches anything else — you can't scramble safely with a partner if you're not paying attention to where they are. That's a habit that outlasts the mat.

If your kid wrestles in the winter, or you're just curious whether they'd take to it, come watch a Tuesday class before deciding anything. The first class is always free, and there's no gear required beyond a t-shirt and shorts. Our Riverside academy is in the middle of a move right now, so give us a call or text at (951) 337-3781 and we'll send over current directions and get your kid on the mat.

August will be here before the heat breaks. Might as well spend a few of these summer evenings getting a head start.

See the Youth NoGi & Wrestling Program