In his final season, Jarrett Jacques is wrestling more free than ever before

In the week following the 2022 NCAA Championships, Missouri coach Brian Smith sat down with his 157-pound starter Jarrett Jacques. 

Despite it being the first week of the offseason, the junior was dressed and in the practice room ready to work on the mistakes at the tournament when Smith gestured Jacques over for a conversation. Once they sat down, Smith dropped some news on him.

“(Smith) was like, ‘You’re out of here for a month,’” Jacques said.

Behind the scenes, Jacques had struggled for the majority of his collegiate career with what he described as a roller coaster ride. He’d go through spurts of greatness where he’d wrestle at his full potential and inversely spurts of wrestling too timidly and not allowing himself to move with the flow of the match.

While he spent an exhaustive amount of time on the mat and in the weight room over his first four seasons as a Tiger, Jacques acknowledges that he used the physical training as a way to evade the mental training he needed.

Jacques fell into a pattern of overanalyzing both before matches and in real-time. Instead of being reactive, he became hesitant while trying to predict his opponent’s next move.

“What I would find myself doing is either hitting a half attack or just not doing it at all,” Jacques said.

After trying different ways of getting over the mental hurdle he was faced with, which even included seeing a sports psychologist, Smith presented an out-of-the-box challenge to reshape the way Jacques approached wrestling.

In Smith’s office on the fourth floor of Hearnes Center, Smith explained that Jacques should take the month to invest in his life outside of wrestling.

While Jacques eventually rejoined the team for lifts in the interim, his absence from the practice room lasted four and a half weeks. The break in the action afforded him the distance to address the problems he’d been running from for years. 

Through extensive writing exercises and in-depth conversations with associate head coach Kendric Maple, Jacques unpacked his fears and rediscovered why he loved wrestling in the first place.

This was exactly what Smith had intended for his wrestler.

“I felt like he was too focused on making it a grind instead of enjoying it,” Smith said.

Through ongoing dialogue with the coaching staff and growing in his faith, Jacques gained a fresh perspective that has given him the freedom to not fear losses in the same way as past years.

In his final season as a collegiate wrestler, his mindset shift has shown up in his results on the mat.

With one dual left in the regular season, Jacques is 13-3 and ranked #14 at 157 pounds. He’s also having the time of his life doing it.

“The way I’m wrestling this year, it hasn’t been perfect, but I’m having so much more fun,” Jacques said. “I’m walking off the mat knowing there wasn’t a whole lot left in me and exerted everything I had.”

Even in the losses, Jacques has seen on film this season that he lost because of mistakes and risks he took wrestling more freely instead of just sitting back and not pulling the trigger. 

His shift in mentality has allowed him to find the flow state during matches, where he feels like he can lose himself and react with the rhythm of the match without needing to think and analyze every move an opponent makes.

With the final two tournaments of his collegiate career just a month away, Jacques is redefining how he wants to view his success. He is no longer defining himself by wins and losses. The new objective is to give each match everything he has and leave it all on the mat.

“My goals are just to be all that I can be,” Jacques said. “I’m just not having a limit for myself. So far this year, it’s been paying off pretty well.”

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