Time Well Spent

It has been a while since my last blog post. It has been a busy and exciting past few months. Besides bringing home our new born daughter Lily last month, the Tahoma wrestling team finished out the wrestling season strong with a district and regional championship followed by a 2nd place finish at the state tournament. Additionally, I have had the opportunity  to share with administrative leaders from the Tahoma School District and also from several other school districts on the One School initiative work that we started last fall to increase student engagement and relationships in our school. The last two months have been incredibly busy and I finally feel like I have the time to reflect on the experiences I have had.


Our daughter, Lily Ann Feist, was born the Monday after the district wrestling tournament on February 8th and weighed 8.6 lb. She is healthy, happy and incredibly beautiful. I had several friends and associates try to explain how special the bond between daddies and their little girls are but until I got her home and held her in my arms while she rested on my chest I did not truly understand the power of this new found love. It has been a wonderful experience that was made even more special by all the friends and family that helped our family transition from 3 to 4. Kerstin and I were over whelmed by the number of people that wanted to help us. Besides the help from our parents and other family members, who were awesome, the Tahoma wrestling community organized and rallied to help Team Feist. The wrestling parents organized over two weeks of dinners that were ready to go for our family so Kerstin and I could focus on caring for the new baby girl and our 3 year old in the evenings rather than cooking. Members of our wrestling family also thought of our three year old and how tough this transition was going to be on him and sent Andrew coloring books and toys to remind him that had not been forgotten in the glow of the new baby. We even had parents of one of my former wrestlers offer to help us with some of the house hold chores since Kerstin was still recovering from her C-section I was still busy with wrestling. The food and gifts did more than just feed our bodies, if helped nourish our hearts and souls. We are very blessed to be loved by so many.

Besides celebrating our new baby, we also have had much to celebrate regarding the Tahoma Wrestling team this year. Our boys wrestled incredibly well and I am very proud of all of them. Our JV and Varsity went undefeated in duals and won the SPSL N dual meet championship. Also, the boys were district and 4A Region 1 champions. The team was gunning for a state championship but came up a bit short and finished 2nd to University of Spokane. Though we had 10 wrestlers at the state tournament with 5 placers and four finalists, University HS wrestled a near perfect tournament and deserved to take home the championship. It was a joy to watch the THS boys set high goals and perform so well this year.

In the days following the tournament, I found myself in a bit of a “funk” and at first I thought it was due to the fact that we came up a bit short in our pursuit to win a championship, but that was not the case. After three days of thinking about the tournament and the season as a whole I realized my “funk” came from the realization that the state tournament was the last time I was going to coach many of the young men on our team. Out of the 12 seniors that were on the team this year, all of them wrestled their final high school matches this past February and our time together as coach and athlete had come to an end. I have been with most of these seniors for the past 7 years of our lives and the bonds and connections we have developed run deep. I have watched them grow from squirrely little middle school boys into confident and motivated young men. I feel incredibly fortunate and blessed to have been able to: teach, coach, mentor and most of all love these incredible individuals. Though I have coached many seniors and am always a bit melancholy to see them go, I have never had such a large number of them move on. I was able to come to peace with this year’s transition when I was reminded of the big picture and great circle by my favorite poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost. Though this year’s seniors are done with high school wrestling and ready to move onto the next phases of their lives, I am thankful for the experiences and time we had together. Additionally, I am energized and excited to work with the many talented underclassmen returning for another exciting and rewarding season of wrestling in 2011.



Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leafs a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.