Dan:

I share many of your same reservations about six and under participation at State. I know of kids who either won State or were very high placers at 8&U and they are no longer wrestling. I think there is a strong possibility that the expectations after that early success proved to be too much for those families and it contributed later to them leaving the sport.

It seems though that now we have so many six and under open tournaments in comparison to 8 years ago when my son started wrestling as a 6&U wrestler. In fact I am not even sure they had open 6&U tournaments when my son started 8 years ago. I think 6&U might have been all novice tournaments then. Maybe I am mistaken it was our family's first year in wrestling. The thing is though this 6&U group's participation in Open tournaments is growing. They are at all the big meets Salina, Wichita, Liberty Nationals and now their own Ottawa State-like tournament. Maybe the Board or Ned Price needs to talk to the organizers of some of these big tournaments and see how they think the 6&U kids and parents are doing at their tournaments. I don't know if the momentum for 6&U at State can ever be stopped at this point. I guess I am beginning to feel that even though it may not be that good for the majority of the young kids that we need to let the individual families make that decision to participate or not for themselves.

I would also like to address the other point you brought up about kids not participating in Summer wrestling and how we need more participation. I hate to quote this again but here goes. This was reported in the USAW Kansas Kids Wrestling State Body Minutes 11/03/02: "The KWCA had approached Mike and said that they would like to see the Kids wrestling season end earlier. They would like to see it end before High School State, take a couple of weeks break, and then start the summer freestyle-Greco-roman season. They honestly feel we are going too long!! A brief discussion followed, but it was decided to leave as is."

My question to you, Dan is this: Do you think that the KWCA has a point and that maybe the reason we do not see that much Summer freestyle competition for both grade school and high school kids is that our Folkstyle competition is too long and that if it were shorter for both groups as the KWCA suggested to us back in 2002 that maybe we might have more participation of freestyle at both the grade school and high school level? I think it is true of my son who last year practiced freestyle for two months but felt too burned out to wrestle the meets. He is planning on just doing the same this year and just practice freestyle two nights a week but not wrestle any freestyle meets. The decision not to wrestle the freestyle meets the last two years is his decision not mine.