Alabama’s Andrew Roden takes it to the mat in The World Games 2022 sumo competition
After wrestling for years in high school and college, Guntersville resident Andrew Roden took a nine-year hiatus. After he became interested in sumo wrestling, he returned to the mat in 2020, besting two former national champions in his first tournament. Now he's competing in The World Games 2022. (contributed)
Andrew Roden thought long and hard about how he became a wrestler.
“I loved the self-responsibility that goes into wrestling,” the 34-year-old Guntersville resident said. “You don’t rely on a teammate; it’s all on you. It’s a sport where you literally get out of it what you put into it.”
Roden recalled his first two wrestling coaches, who instilled the belief in their young charges that they could be good at anything if they worked hard enough.
“That really resonated with me because I was not an athletic kid,” he said. “I was uncoordinated and I was fat and I was just sort of a goofy kid. I’d never been really good at baseball or football or anything like that. Athletics weren’t really my thing.”
Fast forward to today and Roden is on the cusp of being on stage with some of the best athletes in the world as he is set to compete in The World Games 2022.
But the Guntersville resident won’t be wearing a singlet as he did while grappling through college. He will instead wear a mawashi, the diaper-looking heavy fabric loincloth of his adopted sport – sumo wrestling.
Roden’s route to the sumo mat at the sold-out Boutwell Auditorium on Saturday, July 9, was one he didn’t envision, until the vision became clear. It began when he and a friend visited Birmingham in early 2020 and he spotted a sign.
It read, “Home of The World Games.”
Knowing nothing about The World Games, Roden Googled it and saw the various sports, including sumo. He had wrestled in middle school, high school and college, and this Japan-born sport caught his eye.
“I think that would be fun to watch,” he said. “I go, ‘I have to come watch that in a couple of years.’ But I wanted to learn more about the sport so I’d know what I would be going to watch.”
Andrew Roden, second from right, at training camp with other members of Team USA in Sumo. (contributed)
A few YouTube videos and other research helped the grappler learn the rules, which turned out to be pretty simple.
“I’m watching and I’m like, ‘I’d be pretty good at this,’” he recalls. “I’d always been powerful and explosive (in his wrestling style), and I’d always been a very physical wrestler. Those are what I would say are the three main tenets that make a good sumo wrestler.
“As I started learning more about the sport, that’s when my mindset transitioned from being a potential fan to being a competitor.”
It hasn’t taken long for the sport to learn about him. His first sumo tournament was in September 2020 in San Antonio, Texas.
“I took the sumo world sort of by storm, so to speak,” Roden said. “I went 10-0 and beat two defending national champions. From there on out, the sumo world in America was like, ‘Who is this guy?’”
Friends from his native Carrollton, Georgia, could have provided some insight into the man who has apparently come to sumo from nowhere. He was a four-time state tournament qualifier at Carrollton High School and placed second at the state tournament his senior year.
“I actually earned All-American honors my senior year by placing sixth at the NHSCA, which is the National High School Coaches Association preseason national tournament,” said Roden, who competed collegiately at Division II New Mexico Highlands University.
After that, Roden was on a nine-year hiatus from wrestling. But like riding a bike, the grappler has again found his groove.
“Those motor skills, they get so conditioned into you, especially in college because you wrestle so much,” he said. “It’s almost second nature at this point in my life.”
After college, Roden ended up in Alabama. “My family has always lived in the Guntersville area,” he said. “Even though I grew up in Carrollton, my dad moved from Carrollton by the time I graduated college. I ended up settling back in the Guntersville area because this is where most of my family’s from.”
The 253-pound middleweight qualified for The World Games at the North American Championships in Las Vegas in December. When he’s not training for sumo competition, he is a student at Grand Canyon University, studying to earn his Ph.D. in psychology with a concentration in performance.
His schoolwork helps prepare him for his work on the mat. He learns how to manage anxiety, how to identify different stressors and how to compartmentalize things.
“I have a very regimented routine for getting up in the morning, eating breakfast, even getting to the gym and stretching and warming up,” he said. “It’s the same way I warm up before competition.
“Basically, it’s like using operant conditioning on myself. I’m conditioning my body to reach maximum performance every day. I do that in competition and it’s like unconsciously my body knows that, ‘OK, we’re ready to give a maximum performance right now.’”
To learn more about The World Games 2022 and to buy tickets, click here.
