scholastic wrestling. seems like mostly an excuse to get young boys in lycra. there's not much athleticism or skill to it, it's just two guys sloppily slapping at each other's bodies and grappling while weirdos in the audience yell random meaningless instructions like "PUT YOUR LEG OVER HIS!" "NOW TWIST YOUR BODY!" I always thought people who coach from the stands were a little "off" but I gave them a fair shot and watched several wrestling videos to see if those instructions really help or if the wrestlers are even able to incorporate random screaming advice while trying to win a match. If the opponent hears this too doesn't that mean they know what to expect and can counter-attack all the more efficiently? This goes for basketball fans too who love coaching from the bleachers.
I wrestled in high school. It's virtually impossible to make sense out of anything anyone yells at you when you're on the mat, even when it's your coach and hes right at the mat edge.
Besides which, "Put your leg over his" and "Now twist your body" are essentially meaningless. If you want to shout advice, then do the homework to learn the names of the dozens of moves and countermoves; any thing else is just showing ignorance.
Things back, I can only remember a few matches where any yelled advice helped, and they were all instances when I was wrestling against a known opponent who was tough enough that our coaches and team captains had analyzed the guy's skills and tactics and come up with some solid ideas for countering him, and we'd talked ahead of time about options, so the advice being yelled by my coach wasn't spur-of-the-moment, it was signalling "Use this option now!", or in the case of my team captain it was hand signals that we'd worked out ahead of time since it was at a tournament with eighteen matches going at once -- yelling would have been useless.
BTW, you're wrong -- there's one heck of a lot of skill and a high level of athleticism. Wrestling is right up there with swimming for using every muscle in the body, so except for the heavyweights wrestlers are basically all muscle. Just the basic set of moves numbers several two dozen, and for every move there are two or three countermoves, and you have to learn them well enough that you don't have to think about it, muscle memory takes over and you just respond. Getting to that point requires drill, drill, and more drill; any move a guy is really good at is one he's practiced hundreds of times against multiple opponents. Learning a new move or countermove starts with watching someone good at it demonstrate, then practicing it in slow motion to learn every nuance of balance, angles, what and when to twist, repeating it a half dozen times or more in slow motion until you've got it well enough to start speeding up. The slow motion practice requires immense control over every muscle involved and intense awareness of balance. And almost equally important for the beginner is learning all the things that are illegal, especially since some of them seem obvious and effective.
To get really good you have to learn to feel what your opponent's muscles are doing and know what that's telling you. That's another thing that has to be learned so thoroughly you don't have to think about it and your muscles respond to this or that muscle tightening automatically. I recall a match where the way my opponent's abs flexed just as the referee said, "Wrestle!" told me what he was planning and I was moving into the counter before the second syllable of "wrestle", without consciously having thought about it.
And that makes me think of another aspect: you really, really have to learn what your own body is capable of doing! I got called "Rubber man" by teammates because I was limber enough to twist out of holds that ordinarily involved just a contest of sheer muscle (those holds are one of the instances where you actually have time to think), in fact I could escape from one particular hold that no one else on the team (or any opponents we met) could counter; people watching thought it looked like I was dislocating a shoulder and breaking my spine at the same time.
Just by the way, when I started wrestling singlets had just started being used as uniforms, and they weren't very flexible. We switched to ones with more Lycra my sophomore year, which pretty much did away with one fairly common penalty: grabbing the opponent's uniform. The newer uniforms also made it much, much easier to feel what the opponent's muscles were doing.
A lot of in-team wrestling practice was done old-style: trunks that were practically Speedos and nothing else. It's a whole different game when it's skin against skin, especially after the first third of a minute when sweat starts to flow! Once you've learned to wrestle that way, going against a guy in a singlet uniform seems easy... or at least easier.
