Wrestlers get two days of ‘Crass Training’ at Gilman camp

CATCHING UP WITH JORDAN CRASS

Long after winning the last of his three straight championships as a Medford Raider, Jordan Crass is still all about winning –– on and off the mat.

Owner of the Crass Trained Weigh-In Wrestling Club, now based in the A-T Elite Performance Center in Altoona, Crass has been sharing his winning methods with youth wrestlers of western and central Wisconsin for 10 years as well as trying to teach them lessons they’ll carry with them in all aspects of life.

He brought a taste of that to Gilman last Thursday and Friday, holding a two-day, four-hour Crass Trained Wrestling Clinic with one of Wisconsin’s latest three-time WIAA state champions, Blaine Brenner of Stanley-Boyd, who is joining the University of Minnesota’s wrestling program this fall.

“We’ve got guys who have come through the program that are professional football players, like Mason Stokke (of Menomonie) who plays for the Carolina Panthers,” Crass said after last Thursday’s session. “We’ve had guys who have come through the program that are doctors. We’ve had a couple guys who have come back as chiropractors. The program is great for winning wrestling matches, but it speaks lots more than that. We’re preparing these guys to win at life. They’re going to go out and they’re going to have a work ethic. They will have faced adversity. They will have been knocked down and been picked up a dozen times before they ever get knocked down for real.”

Much like his high school days of 2000-04, the energy level for Crass when on the mat was still high last week as he demonstrated techniques for nearly two dozen youth wrestlers of all ages while also talking during breaks to emphasize preparation, confidence and the importance of doing things right in practice.

“The biggest thing with coming to these camps and doing these camps is outreach, putting the product in front of people that are maybe potential customers that haven’t seen the product,” Crass said. “But the other thing is just being able to share your passion with kids that maybe haven’t had a coach like me. There’s a lot of coaches out there and everybody brings a little something different to the table. I try to just get them with the energy. My biggest thing is this has to be more fun than Xbox.”

Fun is something Crass is definitely having. He considers himself extremely fortunate to have found a way to keep wrestling as a centerpiece in his life. And when it came to wrestling, Jordan, nor his twin brother Josh and older brother Jake, rarely failed when they were growing up. Jordan and Josh remain Medford’s only three-time WIAA state champions and Jordan’s 175-5 overall record is the best a Raider has ever compiled. He and Josh went undefeated in their last three seasons. Josh, also lives in the Eau Claire area and is on the Regis-Altoona high school coaching staff.

“It’s a dream come true, I mean really it is,” Jordan Crass said. “When I first started my career, I was a manufacturing engineer by trade. I started building this little wrestling club on top of my job, with my small family growing at home. I was running just a local youth wrestling program, Eau Claire Youth Wrestling, and it got huge in a hurry. I had a couple of the dads asking for more time and asking for more private lessons.

“It sounded awesome, but I just didn’t have any more time,” he added. “I was working 50 hours a week, salaried at a job with a young family at home. I was trying to do the club at nights and on the weekends. All of a sudden it got to the point where, hey man, you can quit your engineering job and just do this fulltime. About a year ago now, we opened the training facility over in Altoona and it’s just kind of been gang busters ever since.”

Crass also has a facility in Loyal. The new facility in Altoona has taken Crass Trained to a new level. The A-T Elite Performance Center is a 35,000-square foot, multi-sports performance training facility that includes the wrestling club, gym space, baseball training space utilized by the Momentum Baseball Academy and the Marshfield Clinic’s Altoona Sports Therapy and Rehab Center.

Crass Trained takes on 120 youth wrestling members per year, with half being junior high and high schoolers and the other half in younger age groups. Based on their schedules, their training schedules differ for both segments. The older kids do their more intense training in the summer, while the young kids are out trying various sports and activities. In the winter, when older wrestlers are locked into their school seasons, the younger ones get their heavy work in.

Either way, the club is used seven days a week.

“Our biggest thing is getting guys to the next level, guys that want to wrestle Division I,” Crass said. “We travel the country. We’re gone every month on an airplane somewhere, finding the best guys in the country so we get our guys the opportunity to say hey man I’m a top-10 recruit and I am worth a full ride. Trying to get guys into college on scholarship is kind of what we’re trying to push. In the last two years, we’ve sent six kids to Division I colleges.”

Crass noted one of his club’s athletes, Mason Kauffman of Stratford and Northern Illinois University, was a recent winner of the NCAA’s Elite 90, one of the association’s most prestigious individual awards. Macey Kilty of Stratford, who was on her way to an Olympic berth this year until being injured during the qualifying process is another high-profile Crass Trained wrestler.

“It’s grade point average, it’s social accolades, it’s competition in your sport,” Crass said of the Elite 90. “It’s an award the last two years they didn’t even give out because no one was fitting enough of the description. Mason Kauffman of Stratford is a local guy. A fantastic human being. The biggest thing is not just the wins and losses and getting to that next level, but it’s the kind of human we’re creating throughout the process.”