Foley’s report on Intermat.com - Feb 22, 2019


Q: I agree with your take on youth wrestling. It's a broken system with too much emphasis on winning and not on development.

I coach youth wrestling and some of it makes me sick to watch. You see 4-5 year old's who have no idea why they are there cornered by seemingly novice wrestling coaches and/or parents screaming at them and the ref. It is not a good look.

I've thought about this model for kids under 10:
Break them up by age like we already do (5-under, 6 & 7, 8 & 9).
4-man round robins in all tournaments NO WEIGHT CLASSES. These four are close in weight, they go together.
Three 1-minute periods. Green starts on bottom in second. Red on bottom in third.
If there is a pin, they start on the feet (or referees' discretion). Third pin will end the match.
Raise both hands at the end.
No trophies, no medals, no records, just go have fun. No state or national tournaments.
Parents cannot be in the corner if there is another coach available. (May be tough to enforce but worth a shot.)
Something needs to change. What do you think?
-- SPM

Foley: If we want to retain some type of tournament competition, I think that your plan is a great starting point!

The idea I was floating (though hadn't fleshed out) was that the competition would remain but would be driven towards rewarding the outcome of wrestling-based games and drills. Scholastic wrestling is so often about brutishness that working to de-emphasize that behavior and emphasize technique, while also maintaining competitiveness, would be an ideal antidote.

Not totally sold on raising both hands. While I also don't get behind all the college coaches using their pedestal to complain about participation trophies, I think it's OK to have kids learn from some failure here or there.

On a side note, it's always struck me as odd that the generation responsible for RAISING the "participation trophy generation" so often are the ones complaining. They somehow don't see that it's their fault, not the kids. Also, by whining about your athletes on camera you are doing the exact thing you JUST complained about (blaming other people), Mr. Tough Guy Football Coach!

Thoughts on youth wrestling
By Matt W.

I thought the youth wrestling stuff was interesting and important to discuss. I agree that we have issues with the youth wrestling culture, but I don't think abolishing all youth competition up until a certain age is the solution. I really think that would also harm youth numbers. Most of us really love to compete and I think that starts at a young age. The important thing is to find a way to foster that in a healthy way for all of those involved. Abolishing things is often a lazy solution and may very well shift the bad behavior to older ages. Now, do I concede that certain youth events have gotten way out of hand, such as traveling all over the country so a 5-year-old can compete at Tulsa or Vegas, or anything of the sort? Resoundingly yes. However, I do want to tell you about another experience I had with youth wrestling that has convinced me that we can't abolish youth tournaments, and that there are workable solutions to erratic parents/coaches.

Before I came to the University of Iowa for law school I was living and working in Chicago and helped coach a youth club affiliated with Beat the Streets in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood. If you aren't familiar, Englewood is on Chicago's southside and is one of most dangerous areas of the city. We had about 40 kids K-8. These kids, as you might have imagined, had very little relative to many in the rest of our country. Certainly no parents were going to drive them to Tulsa for a massive tournament. We took them to about eight tournaments in the season and hosted our own on MLK Day. We were really focused on the development of the kids and teaching them everything wrestling had given to all of us, and there was minimal if any focus on winning and losing. With that being said, the Saturdays that these kids went to compete were the highlight of their week, and maybe even month at times. This ranged from the kid pinning his way through the tournament to the kid who got stuck in every match. They were excited to experience something new and unique such as riding the bus together to a suburb and to compete and spend the day with their friends and teammates. We were able to get money to get everyone the same T-shirt and shorts for tournaments as well, and every single kid wore their warm-ups with the utmost pride at each of those tournaments. Seeing the positive impact those tournaments had on those kids really got me excited for youth wrestling again, when it was something I had thought of as rather noxious for quite some time.

So, here we are with the terrible stories of parents getting in fights and other instances of youth tournaments being massively positive experiences for some kids. Due to my experiences I really think we cannot possibly abolish youth tournaments until a kid is 10, 12 or any other age. I do like the idea of skills-based competitions where there is little to no spectacle and the focus is on developing young people. Some things I saw in the Chicago suburbs that was far more effective than the small-town Iowa style of running youth tournaments was the requirement of USA Wrestling certified coaches, roping off the mats from anyone that is not a registered wrestler or certified coach, and the degree of control that event organizers had as a whole. If those practices become more regular and perhaps more regulated by state AAU or state USAW bodies I think we will see a massive decline in inappropriate behavior. A couple commenters on the mailbag also discussed the coach's obligation to educate parents. I think that is extremely important as well and can remedy a lot of aspects of issues we see here.

All-in-all, great piece as always. I just think that a call to abolish is knee-jerk, punishing the wrong group, and a lazier solution than we can really come up with. Just wanted to share the experience I had with the last group of kids I coached and how valuable that experience was for them. Really makes me want to search for more solutions that get them and keep them excited for wrestling. The best part about when you write these things is that it gets the conversation started, and I think that is what you're ultimately calling for in the article