Let me start this by saying I enjoy the FS/GR season and the change in styles. Having said that I am going to offer some counter ideas and some potential negative second and third order effects of shortening the folkstyle season....

1. Elephant in the room.....FS/GR out of Olympics. If this doesn't change, the need to even compete in FS/GR greatly diminishes. I think some tertiary effects of this are that kids will really focus just on folkstyle because the big goal or pay off will be wrestling in college and competing in the NCAAs not the Olympics.

2. FS/GR rules and scoring needs to change drastically in order to stay relevant. Will posted a good post on this earlier. Too easy to be defensive and score by just rolling somebody. Aggressive wrestlers get punished not rewarded (unless you count pushing somebody out of bounds without even attempting a wrestling move as exciting).

3. Everyone looks at the kids folkstyle season as being sooooo long. It depends on how your club runs it. Yes it is if you start going to tournaments in Nov and then finish in March. Most clubs that I know of focus and compete during the Jan - Mar timeframe. It is mainly the elite kids or the parents who are pushing their kids to be elite that start competing in Nov.

4. It would be nice to at least free up the weekends of high school state and college championships so we could take the kids to watch those events.

5. I also think the sooner we end the folkstyle season....the sooner most kids will start baseball. I do not think you will see the kids transition to freestyle and greco. My guess is that most of the kids (not the elite single sport kids) but the majority of the kids that make up our high school teams will just transition to baseball earlier (or other spring sports).

Recommendation: I would like to see us end the Kansas folkstyle kids INDIVIDUAL season earlier and then see us run a team dual season based on age groups. My reasoning for this is that if you have watched the explosive growth in the desire for kids to compete on the Elementary and Middle School dual teams you see that these kids and parents love these team events. Heck, most of the kids that do freestyle and greco do it so they can be on the Schoolboy, Cadet and Junior duals. Let's take advantage of that.

These are just some random thoughts that pass through my cranium and a contemplate solving the rest of the world's problems. Feel free to agree or disagree with them.

Shawn Budke