BTS Coach Chris Hinton: How Wresting Taught Me To Grow Up

Chris Hinton had to grow up faster than most kids his age.But it took wrestling to make him the man he is.He was a kid from Chicago’s West Side, no dad in the picture, raised by a mom alongside a brothers. By the time Hinton was in eighth grade, his mother needed him to move on. So he did and moved in with his great-grandmother in Garfield Park. By 14, he enrolled himself in high school. It wasn’t the kind of run-in, run-out task many parents are used to. It was complicated. His 88-year-old great-grandmother couldn’t make the trek, so he had to travel alone and figure out the system with the help of a few of the school's staff members.His mother lived on the outskirts of Oak Park, so if he had lived with her, he could have enrolled at Oak Park River Forest High school. But because of his living conditions, the federal government considered him homeless and permitted him to enroll although he was staying in Chicago. Hinton had to catch a bus across the city and into the suburbs just to get to school.“I was just kind of punching my way through,” said Hinton, 22. Then one day Mike Powell came out to talk to the freshman football team, Hinton recalled, to try to persuade them to try wrestling. Powell was the high school’s wrestling coach before he became executive director of BTS Chicago.“He talked about how wrestlers are tough and real men. It drew me in, and I showed up to practice,” Hinton said.And he kept showing up. No matter how hard the practices were. No matter how hard his living situation was. Two years in, his grandmother died and he crashed at a friend’s house, where he found respite from life on the West Side.“Things were going on,” he said. “I was feeling like wrestling was kind of like life -- there’s so much adversity, but you can’t let the adversity keep you down.“I could quit and I could go hang my head, or I could lose a match and go hang my head -- but what good would it do to hang my head?”At the sidelines, Powell and the other coaches watched. They saw what was going on. Without Hinton asking, they gave him what he needed -- and things he didn’t know he needed. Like praise.“I didn’t really know what it was like to have people be proud of me,” he said.They never let him down.That’s why Hinton coaches for BTS Chicago today. The DePaul junior traded his gear for a degree in business and economics, but the wrestler in him remains. Now, he wants to share his skills and his story with others like him.“Yeah, I was drawn into the macho man stuff and how you can be tough and strong,” he said. “But that’s the smallest part of it.”The biggest part is how wrestling changes your character.“Inevitably, you’re going to think you can’t do something, but you do end up doing it.”In life, that’s a priceless lesson for kids -- and grown-ups -- to learn.