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Mat tour: Janesville's Trieloff gets taste of Russia

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Tom Trieloff

If Janesville's Tom Trieloff was at the age when he had to write a "What I did on my summer vacation" paper, it would be filled with stories about travel and wrestling, and at least a couple of paragraphs about borsch.

Trieloff, who is preparing for his senior wrestling season at UW-Whitewater, is a working assistant with the Ken Chertow's wrestling camps. That job has taken him to Wausau, Indiana, Ohio and St. Louis, with a trip to Detroit and a three-week tour of Pennsylvania slated before school starts after Labor Day.

All those domestic miles won't come close to the trip Trieloff and four of his Warhawk wrestling teammates and two coaches took earlier this spring.

The Warhawk contingent traveled to Russia, where it spent two weeks wrestling club teams and discovering the quirks of the country and its people.

"It was a good experience," Trieloff said. "It's a trip that you can't put a price on."

Michael Schnaidt, who grew up in Russia and went to UW-Whitewater, set the seed for the spring trip. He now serves as an assistant coach.

Warhawk coach Tim Fader helped organize the trip. Fund-raisers were set up by the team and by the individuals who wanted to go, and the group left May 26.

Not everything went smoothly. On the flight to Russia, the plane had to make an emergency stop in Newfoundland when one of the passengers (not with the Whitewater group) got sick.

That stop made the group miss its connecting flight in London, which then resulted in lost luggage upon arrival in Russia.

"For the first four days, no one had their luggage," Trieloff said.

Luggage began arriving in groups. Six days into the trip, Trieloff was the only Whitewater member who did not have his luggage.

In a blog on the UW-Whitewater web site, Fader wrote, "Everyone has been working out in the morning and wrestling at night with the same clothes. The thing I respect about our group is that they haven't complained one bit—I think Trieloff kind of likes it."

The wrestling experience turned out much better than the luggage transfer.

"That's all they do growing up," Trieloff said. "The competition was very good."

Wrestling clubs would be literally filled wall-to-wall with wrestlers. The Warhawks would practice with various clubs and then pair off for several matches. At the end of the matches, participants would exchange gifts.

All-American Wrestling Supply and Joe Miller provided the Whitewater group with dozens of shoes, singlets and shirts that the Warhawks used as gifts.

Trieloff said the people in Moscow were difficult, but when the Whitewater wrestlers moved to the smaller cities in southern Russia, people were warmer.

"I think I must have said 'hello' in Russian to 63 people before I had one say it back to me," Trieloff said of Moscow. "That's their society."

The group spent a day staying in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, where it cleared a field with sickles and turned it into a soccer field, and helped construct three brick walls to help expand the facility.

"The director told a story of how he prayed that he would get the help to get his facility going, and he told us that God answered his prayers when we walked through the gates," Fader wrote. "He told me that it would have taken one man a month to do what our group did that day."

Food was plentiful—as was vodka in some of the after-match get-togethers the clubs would put on the U.S. visitors—but Trieloff will not go back to Russia for its culinary fare.

"I really didn't like the food," Trieloff said. "Especially the borsch."

The group returned to the U.S. on June 9.

Trieloff, who was in the military after he graduated from Janesville Craig High School, had spent a year in South Korea, making him used to being out of the U.S. Still, he gained new insight on the trip to Russia.

"I'd love to do it again," Trieloff said. "We all have a better appreciation of what we have here."