Mr. Cokeley you have no power whatsoever to petition to have anyone's right to post removed, as a matter of fact you don't have any power to do anything except whine and complain. Stripes removed! Ha even I got a laugh out of that. You take personal insults to a whole new level, Will Cokely, and then have to audacity to go spouting off who should and shouldn't be officials. If you have nothing better to do than sit around calling me names you need to get a better hobby. Right now I compare your level of maturity to that of an elementary school playground bully.

Now Mr. Broadbent regarding District I. As I stated earlier in another thread, I thought Baldwin did as best of a job that they could do considering the space they had. God forbid if people have to walk a little extra ways because parking is limited (ever been to a Wal-Mart Supercenter?). Honestly it is you as club members who have a voice in determining where the Sub and District tournaments are held each year. If one particular town doesn't have the facilities to host a tournament then perhaps it would be better to find a facility that does have the space, such as having it at the Washburn Campus in Topeka where they had their tournament earlier this year. But rather than find a suitable facility for any of the qualifier tournaments or even State itself, you would rather just eliminate the original "cause" of the problem, which of course is the sheer number of wrestlers we have. And you would do so by eliminating weight classes and even age groups is the process.

Mr. Broadbent and Mr. Nowak, I accept your opinion of the things you think are wrong with USAW Kansas, although I don't really agree with them. I do so on the basis that, what we have now, has survived and worked the last decade, as the number of children participating grows here in Kansas the solutions to the problems that are presenting themselves is not to just eliminate weight classes, which won't change the number of competitors. And it’s most certainly not to disregard entire age groups and alienate the very people for whom you wish to accommodate.

I'm sure you have both read the high school forum where people have suggested that Kansas wrestling is taking a back seat to other states. While this is certainly not true as indicated by the success of Kansas wrestlers at High School nationals, we as a state only get better with the inclusion of all of age groups we now have.

Yes we do have some space issues at SOME of the bigger tournaments of the year. Yes we do have SOME parents and coaches who are not as willing to put in the extra time that the others are. All of this I accept. However I think you will find that the more you try to change, the more other issues will pop up. The split tournament works well for those that truly believe they need to get home as soon as possible, and for that I applaud it. What you all need to understand is we will always have problems of some kind at every tournament. If you spend all your time trying to find problems, its going to be fairly easy. Sometimes you just have to “bite the bullet” and realize that life isn’t as bad as you would perceive it to be. What we are doing now isn’t do any long term damage to our kids, otherwise we wouldn’t have half of the numbers we have now, or had in the past. You say that some kids, parents, coaches are getting away from the sport because it is taking up too much of their time. I say let them go because these are going to be the same kids who probably aren’t going to find much success in our sport anyway. There is a strong correlation between the state champions we have year in and year out, and the sheer amount of time they put into the sport. I wasn’t the successful wrestler that I became because we had 1 hour practices , and I got done with tournaments at 12:00 pm. I also wasn’t at risk for quitting the sport just because I was there a little longer, or because I couldn’t find a parking space. The greats in our sport i.e the Bo Maynes’, the Zach Roberson’s, and pretty much every other champions we have didn’t get where they are by thinking up ways to get home and find some more elbow space. These are tiny things, that aren’t really going to matter to the people that make our sport here in Kansas great. How would you feel if Greg and Leanna Grater only put in half of the time they did now? Or anyone on our state board for that matter? Do you think the state of our program here in Kansas would be what it is without the work these people put in?

In any case, I can see that you two are as passionate about what you believe in as I am, and I respect that. I would encourage either or both of you to contact me personally by phone to discuss these issues, because posting on this forum is impersonal and does convey how a person truly is.