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A Note from Coach Fleckman about the BWN

What are the goals of the BWN? What can we accomplish?

I have now been coaching at Blair for nine years and it is my observation that while many people who have been a part of our program in the past still have strong interest, pride and feelings about Blair Wrestling, most of our connections exist on primarily an emotional level. I have created the Blair Wrestling Network in order to bring us all together in a more tangible manner.

A good number of people want to do various things related to their experience with Blair wrestling. For example:

  • people call or e-mail in order to get the addresses or phone numbers of former teammates,
  • younger alum call to ask whether we know anyone who can provide them with some professional guidance or an internship,
  • and many people simply want to know whether there is anything that they can do to give back to the program.

My hope is that the Blair Wrestling Network will enable people to do many of these types of things and will bridge the gap between generations of Blair Wrestlers. Specifically, I have the following goals in mind at the outset of this project:

  1. To bring the Blair Wrestling family closer together.
  2. To provide opportunities for people to get together, reminisce and celebrate Blair wrestling.
  3. To provide educational and professional networking opportunities for our former wrestlers.
  4. To provide a united "block" of support from the wrestling program back to the school and the development office.

What can we accomplish?

I think that together we can do tremendous good for future generations of young people. One of the things I cherish most about Blair — specifically this program — is that so many good, genuine and talented people are associated with it.

To be more specific, my visions of what we can accomplish are just a starting point. I really feel that much of what can and will be done will be a product of simply getting you all together more frequently and into better contact with one another. However, just to get the conversation rolling a little, here are a few of my ideas:

  • We can meet annually to celebrate the past. I would love to have our inaugural dinner be entitled something like "Eight Decades of Blair Wrestling — A Celebration of Accomplishment." At the dinner we could give out some type of award of appreciation for a person or a couple of people from each decade of our history who have done something special for the school or the program. Whatever we decide, I have to believe that there are a number of people who would love to congregate once-a-year to talk Blair Wrestling.
  • We can help provide support to Blair financial and otherwise (for example many of you would make outstanding speakers for the Society of Skeptics program).
  • We can begin to archive the history of our program for the benefit of future generations. A few people have already spoken to me about making a sort of Hall-of-Fame of Blair Wrestling. I also have an idea for scanning in old yearbook photos and making them available on the Web and/or on CD.
  • We can collectively take part on an annual basis in charitable projects. This coming fall I again plan to have our wrestlers take place in the MS Bike-a-thon in NYC (which was canceled last year due to the terrorist attack) and last winter we made a contribution to the local food pantry with our Pin Down Hunger campaign at the National Preps. It would be remarkable to have a huge block of alumni participate in these events.
  • For some time I have thought that it would be a wonderful thing to start a camp where we take our wrestlers into impoverished neighborhoods in the summer and run a combination summer school/wrestling academy for kids in grades 5-8. It would be great for our wrestlers to teach, to give and to learn to appreciate what they have. In my ideal vision for this one, a couple of 8th graders would be awarded scholarships to Blair each year based on their academic achievement and overall character development.
  • And we can do the small things that make a big difference. We can write recommendations, offer each other guidance, and simply stay in touch with one another.

Potential Features of the BWN

At present you can see that there is not a great deal of content on this portion of the Blair Wrestling site. This is because I want to make this area as much as possible YOURS. Here are a few things though that I am trying to bring about within the BWN.

  1. A newsletter. I think I have someone willing to write a monthly or bimonthly newsletter that only people on the BWN can access. Hopefully, we will have the first edition up in September.
  2. A "Keeping in Touch" section. In this section we can put baby pictures up, make engagement announcements and celebrate important anniversaries and milestones.
  3. A "Remember When" section. In this section, you all could send-in anecdotes about funny things that happened on trips, stories about coaches and whatever else you would like to share from your times as a Blair wrestler. These writings could be similar in nature to the Alumni Spotlight section of our media guides of the late 1990's.
  4. An interactive forum or WebBoard. This one might be difficult from a technical standpoint, but I am working on trying to find a way to make it happen.

What now?

Hopefully now you will click here and sign-on to the Blair Wrestling Network! Also, I am hoping in these first months to hear directly from you about what you would like to do with the BWN. Please e-mail me suggestions or any information that you have about your life or the life of your classmates that would be interesting for other Blair wrestling people to know about.