Good posts on this topic guys.

I had my eyes opened when I moved out of Kansas to Nebraska 9 yrs ago. In Omaha, we joined KWAA wrestling. There they had an extremely organized club program with a novice and varsity program, did duals, lots of hands on work with their coaches and had an excellent relationship with Brad Hildebrandt of Omaha Skutt who ran practices a few times a month. It was an awesome situation and a lot of our club kids are going on to be part of the Skutt dynasty up there. 8 yrs and counting i believe. Also there, emphasis was starting to be placed on freestyle and greco, no long kids state series there, right in to freestyle and greco. It gave us a full month over Kansas at that time. Numbers problems are similar in the participation in the freestyle and greco seasons but i think that is due to population issues for the most part.

A subsequent move to Southern California exposed us to even more emphasis to the freestyle and greco--which was wrestled during the kids season in a blended style as a opposed to folkstyle. High School coaches there in San Diego county had been encouraging the olympic styles and skills to be taught at the younger level. They felt that this made for better overall wrestlers. The heavy olympic style influence stemmed directly from the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, which drew a lot of talented international coaches and wrestlers to the area.
There was a great deal of sharing of technique and coaching styles and it bled over in to the community.

I love Kansas Wrestling and still say we have some of the best wrestling in the nation. I do think we are at times very short sighted in promoting the sport, keeping parents and kids excited and thinking outside of the box on how we do things.