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Jesuit High School, New Orleans, LA -  

Saturday and Sunday are reserved for the second annual Jazz Town Duals, but Thursday and Friday belong to Coach Gene Mills and one of his "Pin2Win" championship clinics.

Mean Gene Mills   1,356 Career Wins 46 Losses 1 Tie 886 Victories by Fall

Coach Mills is a legend in our sport, setting the NCAA career pins record at 107 on his way to two NCAA titles (including one OW) for Syracuse University. He is a three-time World Cup champion, a 1980 Olympian who was voted the "Athlete of the Year" by the Olympic Committee and is a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.  He is also largely credited for the reason the "tech" rule was brought to international wrestling, due to his relentless style.

Coach Gene Mills instructing young wrestlers at Jesuit High School on Thursday afternoon.

Mills has a busy summer schedule.  He was in Birmingham, Alabama, last week, will do clinics in New York next week and then is off to Nebraska, Pennsylvania, New York again, Vermont...and then August starts.  During the high school season Coach Mills heads the Phoenix, New York, Firebirds, and he brought two teams to last season's Deep South Bayou Duals, including three-time New York state champion Nicholas Tighe.

Mills' philosophy on wrestling is a reflection of what tends to work best in life itself:

"Wrestling teaches you hard work and perseverance.  It teaches you there is no shortcut to success.  Everybody is looking for instant gratification.  They're not going to get it in wrestling.  But if you want to prepare yourself for life, there's no better sport than wrestling.  To get out there one-on-one, in front of a crowd, put everything you've got on the line -  and if you do not succeed in your goals right then and there, basically it takes a tough person mentally to get right back up and do it again and again and again.

"That's why," he continued, "62% of all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are wrestlers.  It's because they know that they're a breed that stands apart and when they get knocked down they get right up.  Why do those companies want wrestlers?  Because they know if wrestlers don't succeed they're going to come back twice as hard."

Coach Mills was as shocked as everyone else in the wrestling world when he heard about the International Olympic Committee's recommendation that wrestling be dropped from the 2020 Olympic Games.

 "Took me by surprise...I was [not happy] that they would even consider that.  I do not know why wrestling was in that group to begin with.  The bottom line is wrestling has 78 countries that participate and is more diverse in medalist counts [by country] than most other sports.  When they started the Olympics, the intent was to determine the "alpha" male.  It is the "alpha" of all sports."

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