Learning from losing: How wrestling prepared me for the lab and for life

Photo: Christopher M. Reddy is a world-renowned chemical oceanographer and is a member of Rhode Island College’s Athletics Hall of Fame (2008).

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in WIN’s Fargo Commemorative Issue, which printed on July 31, 2026. 

By Christopher M. Reddy, Ph.D. — Dept. of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry (Woods Hole, Mass.)

If you’ve coached for more than a week, you’ve probably said, “Wrestling prepares you for life.” It rolls off the tongue so easily it can sound like a cliché. What we don’t say nearly as often are the specifics — the concrete ways this sport shapes a life.

This is one of mine. To explain it, I need to start with my wrestling career.

I wrestled from seventh grade through my senior year of college. Over those 12 years, I never made the finals of a tournament until 1992, when, as the No. 1 seed at my Division III conference championships, I finally reached the finals.

I lost that match and never stepped on a mat again.

A few months ago, my 11-year-old son didn’t make the travel basketball team and asked about wrestling — kickstarting my return to the sport and, eventually, a process I never planned: making peace with that last loss and appreciating what wrestling had given me off the mat.

For more than 30 years, I kept that loss in its own box. While many of my former teammates went into coaching or officiating, I went to graduate school, earned my Ph.D., built a career as a research scientist, got married, and raised three children. I thought I had closed the wrestling chapter. I rarely talked about it, even with my family.

“Would it make you mad if I wrestled?” my son asked me.

I realized my silence had given my kids the wrong idea: Dad doesn’t like wrestling.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I loved the sport, even if I didn’t love my record.

A few weeks later, on a Saturday morning, my son watched a coach demonstrate a double-leg takedown. Standing at the edge of the mat, I realized how familiar it all still felt. As his first season progressed, an old part of me came alive.

Living in the Wrestlebacks

I wasn’t an awful wrestler, but I was never considered great. After losing in the quarterfinals at the conference championships my junior year, my head coach tried to cheer me up by saying, “You’re not that good a wrestler.”

Harsh but fair — and perfectly suited to where I spent most of my time: the consolation bracket — the wrestlebacks — a world I knew well.

I wasn’t particularly athletic or flashy, but I was scrappy and tireless. I made up for a lack of gold and silver medals with a long string of fourth-to-sixth-place finishes.

When you’re young, you dream of being announced before the final match and holding the completed bracket with your gold medal — not of fighting for sixth place. But looking back now, I see how valuable the wrestlebacks were.

That’s one of the lessons coaches understand, but wrestlers seldom notice in the moment: the real learning happens in the consolation bracket.

From the Wrestlebacks to the Lab

As a scientist, I’ve achieved more than I ever did on the mat — not because I suddenly became more talented, but because wrestling prepared me for the kinds of challenges that arise far from any spotlight.

Rejection and defeat are common in research. I have faced far more proposal rejections than funding approvals. If I compared my grant “winning percentage” to my wrestling record, my wrestling stats would look pretty good.

When a proposal gets rejected, it can feel like losing in the championship round. But if you’ve spent years in the wrestlebacks, you develop a different instinct: when you get dropped into consolations, you regroup. You look at what went wrong, make adjustments, and start wrestling back.

That’s how I see rejected proposals and failed experiments now — a “no” just sends you to the wrestlebacks, where you rework the idea, rewrite it and resubmit.

If you can handle the daily grind of the wrestling room, the daily grind of almost any tough job becomes easier. Long, slow progress, small improvements, dealing with frustration and fatigue — these are things wrestlers face every day. The rest of the world just calls them by different names.

Coming to Terms, With Help From a Double-Leg

So why am I writing this now, after three decades of barely mentioning my wrestling career?

Watching my son grow — through defeat and victory — as both a wrestler and a more confident young man forced me to revisit everything I’d buried after that final loss.

I no longer see myself as a failed wrestler. For years, I let that last match define me and obscure what the sport had already given me — the many wins that came before it and those that followed in the lab, at home and throughout my life.

Wrestling taught me how to handle loss, how to keep working when no one is watching, and how not to be intimidated by the name on the other side of the mat — or by someone sitting in the front row of your presentation.

In a 64-person tournament bracket, 63 wrestlers go home with a loss, and 62 are knocked into the consolation bracket. Most of life looks more like that than standing alone on top of the podium. Very few people move forward without setbacks. Most of us advance the same way wrestlers do: we get knocked down, regroup and wrestle our way forward.

That’s the part I don’t think we say out loud enough when we tell kids, “This sport prepares you for life.” It’s not about avoiding losses. It’s about what you learn to do after they happen.

About the Author

Christopher M. Reddy is an internationally-recognized chemical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Cape Cod, Mass.) who specializes in responding to oil spills and other pollution events. He recently joined the coaching staff of the Wareham Tigers youth wrestling program.