The 2015 Senior Perspectives is the 10th in a series of annual collections. Senior captains and representatives of teams at Harvard have been invited to contribute viewpoints based on personal experience from both their senior seasons and full varsity careers at Harvard.

For a complete listing of 2015 Senior Perspectives,click here.

Gregory Kristof, Wrestling 
Hometown: Scarsdale, N.Y.
Concentration: Philosophy 
House Affiliation: Kirkland

It has been over three years since the day I first walked into Coach Weiss' office asking him to let me walk on to the varsity team. These past three years have contained some of the hardest moments of my life: like our 45-minute Thanksgiving grind match; like those preseason moments when we must climb the stadium steps with a partner on our shoulders; like those moments in the room when our lungs are pounding and our legs are burning and all any of us wants is for practice to just end. I sometimes imagine how much easier my life would be if I had never walked into Coach Weiss's office that day. But Harvard wrestling has transformed me. 

Harvard wrestling has transformed me precisely because it has demanded that I sacrifice for it. The time commitment of Harvard wrestling has forced me to develop the discipline of time management. The intensity of training has allowed me to develop mental toughness. More fundamentally, wrestling places people under pressure in a way that allows them to reveal their virtues. How I perform in that wrestling circle - whether during that seventh minute I can still muster the will to stand up and mount an escape - is a question of who I am at my most basic level: conqueror or quitter. My teammates have inspired and shaped me more than any other set of students on campus, and one reason for that is that the rigors of the wrestling mat have brought out their discipline, fortitude, and integrity in such high relief. 

Harvard wrestling has taught me how to develop not just physical stamina but moral stamina. That is because becoming a successful wrestler requires more than skill and strength. You must also refuse to quit, even during that last minute when exhaustion is beating at the gates. You must forgo that dinner to make weight, even as everyone else at the table wolfs down theirs. These things - fortitude, self-restraint - are not physical traits; they are moral traits. They are the kinds of things that constitute what is often called one's “character.” I believe that to be ferocious in that circle, and to stay ferocious over a season, takes a certain moral integrity.

Harvard wrestling has a way of molding you into the person it needs you to be. After performing countless partner-carries and armbars, I changed. It wasn't just that I had now done lots of strenuous things. It was that I had become the kind of person for whom doing strenuous things was now normal. Success in wrestling requires not just that you do certain things, but that you be a certain way. While wrestling taught me to never quit, more fundamentally it taught me to become the kind of person who never quits. My coaches and teammates have shown me not just the kinds of things I must do, but the kind of person I must become, and they have relentlessly pushed me so that I may embody that vision.

This is how Harvard wrestling has changed my life. Thank you, Harvard wrestling.