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Olympic wrestler brings lessons from sports to the classroom

Anibal Nieves
By G. Michael Dobbs

Managing Editor



SPRINGFIELD As Anibal Nieves walks down the corridor to his office at the Children's Study Home he is met with a chorus of greetings from students.

Clearly, the assistant teacher and physical education coach, is popular and part of his approach to the success with the high school age students stems from the lessons he learned at their age as a wrestler.

Wrestling, he told Reminder Publications, gave him the discipline to change his life and to accomplish things he never thought was possible such as competing twice in the Olympics.

Nieves placed 10th in the freestyle division at the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, and 12th at the 1996 Games in Atlanta. He also was a six-time Pan American Games medal winner where he picked up four silver and two bronze awards.

He said he would be watching these Olympics closely as he knows many of the people associated with the wrestling team.

Nieves is a native of Puerto Rico whose family moved to the Bronx when he was a child. He said that he and his twin brother Alberto were "wild kids," but not because of a lack of supervision from their parents. It was the city environment that was causing problems and so his father re-located the family up-state to Ellenville, NY.

Attracted to sports, Nieves looked toward basketball, but his older brother was on the wrestling team and has told his coach about his twin brothers. Before too long Neives found himself watching wrestling practice and facing an opponent for the first time.

He recalled with a smile he was facing a student much smaller than he was and the result was "he just beat me up."

From that moment he was hooked on the sport and his coach Herman Pinkly, who worked with Neives through the year on improving his skills. He even would call Neives on snow days when the school was closed to remind him to get down to the gym for practice.

"Through him [wrestling] changed my whole life," he said.

All the hard work paid off as Nieves received All-America recognition in 1989 after placing sixth in the 134-lb. weight class at the NCAA Division I Championship while competing for East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.

He said that he wasn't the greatest student and when the opportunity came up to be a member of the Puerto Rican national Olympic Team, he left college a year short of finishing his degree. He completed it at American International College.

Moving to Western Massachusetts, Neives served as assistant wrestling coach at Springfield Technical Community College and then nine years as head wrestling coach at American International College (AIC).

While at AIC, Nieves was selected the NCAA Division II East Region Coach-of-the-Year in 1998 after the Yellow Jackets finished fourth in the team standings. He coached five All-Americans and 16 Academic All-Americans at AIC and had 12 national qualifiers.

He is now heading into his second year as head wrestling coach at Western New England College.

He founded and remains the head coach and director of the New England All-Stars Wrestling Club and expressed great pride in one of his current student, Anthony Medina, a student tat Putnam Vocational and Technical High School in Springfield. He believes Medina is Olympic material.

The kind of wrestling Neives teaches is not the kind that can earn an athlete a living. As a competitive wrestler he said he didn't think about money, but rather about winning competitions. He admitted he had mixed feelings when fellow Olympic wrestling Kurt Angle joined the ranks of professional wrestling, but Neives added that Angle has brought more recognition to traditional wrestling.

Neives also noted that with the highly popular mixed martial arts movement, many of the top competitors are wrestlers, such as Chuck Liddell, who wrestling in college. Nieves said that he understands why wrestlers want to make money on their skills, but he doesn't care for the violence of the mixed martial arts competitions.

For him, wrestling has "a technical part, a physical part and a spiritual part." He stressed the sport demands strategic thinking and planning.

He enjoys working with the students at the Children Study Home young people with special education needs who are recovering from abuse and neglect. He sees a little of himself in them, although he said he had a stable loving home which many of his students lack.

"I always try to feed them a dream," he said. "They don't get it at home because sometimes they don't have a home. They grow up in programs."

For more information on the New England All-Stars Wrestling Club, call 221-5633.