I took my son to jay this last year, and it was an awesome experience, my son really liked working with jay (he's only in 4th grade) and really enjoyed going every week....jay's approach reminded me a lot of what Ray Brinzer talked about in the Brody thread (pg.17)...it's long, but I really felt like Jay's approach is very similar to what Ray talks about here....
"I have a number of replies pending, but you get to jump the queue because I'd rather talk about wrestling itself.
I've had conversations with several coaches who've complained about this trend. I take a different view of it. I see it as illuminating a failure in our more conventional technical lines.
A little background. We talk about leg attacks as being part of "the basics". Insofar as "basic" means "fundamental to our approach", that's fine; shooting is characteristic of American wrestling in the same way that counterpoint is characteristic of Baroque music. But it's not "basic" in the sense of "easy". Shooting well is hard, and doing it without opening yourself up to counterattack takes a lot of practice and precision.
The problem is, you don't necessarily realize how vulnerable your shots make you unless someone exploits them. Traditionally, we don't teach counterattacks (except reshots); we teach blocking and sprawling. As a result, our shots tend to have major weaknesses. We practice them with the assumption that people will defend against them the way we would. Even if you're aware of some of the other issues (hip-bumping, locking over the top, taking a double wrist lock, going to a crotch lock, etc.), it's hard to tighten up your attack to disallow them when there's no one around who does them well.
So this is where I get a fed up with a certain traditional, judgmental strain in our coaching culture. Shooting is "good", The Funk is "junk", and when your athletes' shots aren't working, you complain about their opponents. As opposed to, say,
fixing your shots.
There's a process to this. I come up with a nice attack, and start scoring a lot of points with it. You come up with a response, which either stops it or counters it. Then I go back to work on how to defeat your defense. Through a back-and-forth process, we explore the problem space and advance our understanding of the sport.
So, the development of this kind of defense should be good for wrestling. I think that's true even if it turns out to be a refuted line of play: that is, if we learn that when both athletes make optimal choices, the defense fails. Or, for that matter, if (as I think unlikely) it turned out that most leg attacks are ultimately refuted.
What's not good for wrestling is failing to push the state of the art forward. If you're going to teach your athletes to shoot, teach them to beat these defenses. If you're not going to do that, pick a different line of attack, and avoid the problem. But don't teach something which used to be good enough and complain about the results.
As far as my own coaching: I'd teach this sort of thing as what I call "back pocket moves". They're not your first line of defense, and maybe not even your second... but it's a dangerous wrestler who, when all his normal tactics have failed, and he seems beaten, still has some tricks in his back pocket. A scramble, to me, indicates a failure earlier on, and when breaking down a match where we did this, I'd be asking, "Why did we get to the point where this was necessary?" But failures are going to happen, and I wouldn't criticize an athlete for making the best of a bad situation.
669 Ray Brinzer, Jan 2, 2016"
