Sweet Home wrestlers Trever Olson and Colton Schilling returned last weekend from the trip of a lifetime €“ 10 days in South Africa.
The two, who will be freshmen at Sweet Home High School this fall, are experienced youth wrestlers who were chosen to travel with 15 other wrestlers, ranging in age from 14 to 19, on the Oregon National Wrestling Team South Africa Exchange program, led by coaches Mike and Lamont Simons of Thurston and Scott Shannon of Elmira.
The team wrestled several duals against all-star teams from various South African provinces and competed in two tournaments.
Schilling, 14, wrestled 24 matches, winning 21 €“ and beating all the opponents he’d lost to earlier, including two national champions, and winning one tournament. Though he broke a hand in a youth tournament in July, he said he felt fine, though he wrestled with his hand taped.
“What made me really feel good is all kids I lost to I beat,” he said. “All those people down there were really built. There were no overweight, chubby kids. They had high standards for wrestlers.”
Olson, 15, wrestled 21 matches, winning 10. His losses included five to a South African national champion, though the third match was a close one.
He said they discovered that moves that are illegal in Oregon are permitted in matches there, including the chin rip, in which a wrestler is permitted to intentionally bring an arm up under an opponent’s chin and snap their head back.
“I got choked out by a chin rip in one match,” he said.
Schilling said the trip gave them exposure to different approaches to the sport.
“It opened us up to a different style,” he said. “We’ve wrestled freestyle and Greco before but they do it differently. We can fluctuate to how other people wrestle. They wrestle all year round. We wrestle three different styles during the year. They can do lot of different stuff down there.”
Olson said most of the wrestlers they met were white, but there were also some blacks and some Indians.
“There are only 2,000 wrestlers in South Africa,” he said. “We have twice as much in Oregon.”
In addition to the wrestling, they got a taste of a different culture and got some exposure to South African wildlife. At one stop they got to ride ostriches, which they said was “kind of freaky.”
“It was scary because you have to put your legs under their wings and hold onto their front,” Schilling said. “They have big guys riding them and they would just take off with us.”
They said that, though they saw a difference in lving standards among the various races, it seemed like things were better since the end of apartheid.
“Our coach was there 20, 21 years ago, and he said it was really bad,” Schilling said. “Eighty-nine percent of the country is black,” Olson noted.
“Most of the rich people are white,” Schilling said. “Blacks are really poor and stuff but they’re not as bad off as they used to be.”
In addition to visiting some national parks and seeing some wildlife, they went to some theme parks with their South African counterparts.
“We were forced onto the log rides,” Olson said. “Our South African buddies made us go onto the water rides when it was freezing outside. They said we wouldn’t get wet.”
“They had some pretty good roller coasters that dried us off,” Schilling said.
The two said they enjoyed Cape Town best of the several cities they stopped in. Though it is winter in South Africa, they said the weather in Cape Town was more moist when the rest of the country is in the dry season.
“It was pretty down there,” Schilling said. “There were mountains and trees.”
They said the food was a little different than Oregon’s. The pork tended to be from wild boar and they ate “a lot of steak,” mashed and baked potatoes, fired corn and “mashed-up corn starch stuff.”
“They had some good stuff,” Schilling said, noting that McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants were common.
The two said they enjoyed haggling with street peddlers.
“The best shopping was the vendors on the side of the streets,” Schilling said. “That’s the places you want to go shopping. You can bargain. The flea markets are places you can bargain.”
They said most of what the peddlers tried to sell them were wood carvings and statues made of stone, impala horns and springbuck skins.
Olson said he got a hippopotamus tusk with elephants carved into it for “like 100 rand €“ which is like $15.”
“They’ll maul you there,” he said. “They surround you.”
Schilling said he started figuring out how to do business after a couple of experiences with peddlers.
“They bargain majorly down there when they see Americans like us,” he said. “They’d lower their prices but we’d shoot them down.”
Sweet Home Coach Steve Thorpe said the trip may have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the wrestlers.
“They got to go with great coaches and not only was it a wrestling trip but it was an educational trip,” he said. “As they get older they’ll appreciate even more just where they were at. I only wish I could have gone with them.”