At last week’s 13th annual Jones County High Greyhound Summer Wrestling Camp, coach Daniel Lewis found himself instructing wrestlers in a dark gymnasium due to renovations that are taking place at the school.

Luckily, Lewis said, he had a group of mostly experienced campers who could probably wrestle with their eyes closed if need be, so the light from a few open doors was more than enough.

“We only had maybe four kids who had never wrestled before, so that allowed me to teach at a little higher level,” he said.

For $20 per day for four days out of the week, campers could enjoy instruction from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m.

The biggest crowd the coach had was 30, while by Friday his numbers were about half of that.

Lewis said that the long hours were likely to blame for the drop in attendance, but he added a couple more hours per day than he has in the past in order to make up for having a four-day camp instead of going five days.

“By the time they leave at 5 p.m., they’re worn out,” he said.

The coach said he also expected it to be difficult to keep the campers’ attention for such a long period.

“We change gears a lot and try to get them from one thing to another every 20 minutes or so,” Lewis said.

Lewis also employed some creative means to keep his wrestlers interested.

The daily one-and-a-half-hour lunch break also included a period of recreation in which games were played that were not only fun, but were also based on different wrestling skills.

“I try to make some of the skills into games so that they don’t realize they are working when they really are,” Lewis said.

Campers worked on takedowns from 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m., with the lunch break and recreation period following until 2 p.m., and the final three hours of each day consisted of mat wrestling and live competition.

“During the season, you always have to start from square one,” Lewis said. “This is an opportunity to show them some higher-level moves that they wouldn’t get that much practice with during the season.”

Lewis said the biggest thing he stressed to his campers all week was that if they learned only one or two moves that they could become very good at and use during the season, then the camp was worthwhile.

He said about 80 percent of his varsity roster attended the camp, with a few missing due to job schedules or vacations.

He was also happy to see a large number of campers who were products of the county’s upstart middle school wrestling program.

“We’ve had a middle school program for a few years now,” Lewis said. “It’s not at the level I want it to be at as far as numbers and ability, but it still exposes kids to wrestling before they get to high school.”

Lewis said that the addition of a middle school coach with wrestling experience for the coming year should begin to produce more impressive results.

“There is a huge difference between middle school wrestling and high school wrestling, and some of these younger kids haven’t learned that yet,” Lewis said.

“Some kids think that muscle moves will work because they’ve thrown kids around in middle school, but in high school it all really comes down to technique.”

The coach said that he hopes the middle school wrestlers who attended last week’s camp now have a better idea of what it takes to succeed at the high school level.

The high school wrestlers who attended the camp will have a week off before coming back for a team camp, July 7-11.

In past years, the team has made the trip to Virginia for a camp put on by the renowned Granby School of Wrestling, but Lewis opted to run his own version of the camp for a couple of hours each day in Gray.