Next week a professional wrestling company, Can Am Wrestling will be visiting Strathmore. And with it, they will be making a donation of singlets to the Strathmore High School wrestling team, and a giving a show for the community at the Strathmore Civic Centre.

Otto Gentile CEO - CanAm Wrestling, Alberta Wrestling Academy spoke about the show and the donation to the local wrestling team.

This will be their second donation to the team, their first donation was a gift of water bottles, and this new donation is of singlets to be worn by the athletes.

Gentile explained, “Can Am Wrestling has been around since 1996. We went away in 2003.

But now we are back and we are trying to get back to where we were. Back 25 years ago we were the only wrestling promotion that was going across Canada.”

He said, “We went as far as the Queen Charlotte Islands all the way to Hamilton ON, North West Territories and the Yukon, and primarily our shows were centered around First Nation communities because of all the issues that they had with bullying and drug and alcohol situations.”

Their name, Can Am Wrestling stands for constantly against narcotic and alcohol misuse.

Gentile says, “We're trying to deliver messages to the youth, and in elementary students that there are choices in life that you need to make, let's make the right ones, and let's not make the wrong ones that lead you down a path where you can get addicted to something which is going to wreck your life.”

“I'm a firm believer of that because I made the wrong choices in my life, and I had to clean up my act and I'm proud to say that I'm 18 years now clean and sober,” he said.

About the show he said,“We are here to help in any way we can in every community that we go to,” said Gentile. For their first show in the community, it drew in a crowd of 164 people.

“When we go into a community, we look to try and help anybody that we can help in giving back to the community,” Gentile said. “The community takes us in so we try to make them part of our family and we try to help any of those people that are in need.”

He also spoke of their partnership with Bikers Are Buddies Canada, called Adopt a Buddy program.

“We are implementing our program to work with youth homes just people that wouldn't be able to afford to go to something like this,” he said.

The group partners with a number of community groups in order to promote education, outreach and support through their program explained the CEO.

The show consists of six professional wrestling matches, just like the ones you’ll see on TV, he says,

“Only ours is a little more storyline-based. We try to have the fans go through every kind of emotion where it's fun, there’s laughter. You get angry, you get frustrated but it's all part of the show and at the end of the show hopefully we send the fans home happy that they want to come back to see what's going to happen next time around,” says Gentile.

The Can Am Wrestling shows will take place at the Strathmore Civic Centre on February 25. The doors will open at 6 p.m. and the show will begin at 7 p.m.

Watch Can Am Wrestling on their YouTube page here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKF0sl_43HUIKka18aWFdYA

 

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