Transitions are tough, especially when someone follows a coach as good and as respected as Coach Woodford at Manhattan High School.

A lot of things had "grown up" around Coach Woodford during his long and successful tenure at Manhattan High School. He was the face of Manhattan wrestling and will be for a long time, maybe forever.

Coach Gonzalez knows what he is doing in regards to coaching; what he may not know is when something he does runs afoul of a Manhattan tradition, or less seriously, just an accepted way of doing things as in "that is not the way we have always done things."

Very often those who have fewer opportunities to have been other places (such as a high school wrestler who has wrestled in only one program) assume that every place does it the same way; nothing could be further from the truth! Every coach and program has things that are unique to them. Over time it is these unique things that grow up to be the traditions of the program.

The feeling of alienation will lessen with time, as those who wrestled under Coach Woodford are replaced by those who have not. Does this mean that Coach Woodford will be forgotten or become less important to the Manhattan wrestling tradition? No, he will continue to be respected and revered in Manhattan wrestling circles just as Jake Durham is still respected and revered as the coach-emeritus in Norton. In not too many years from now there will be wrestlers in the MHS wrestling room complaining about the way things are or are not being done by the new coach, because that was not the way Coach Gonzalez did them!