Bill

Just want to provide you some updated info based on your comments above.....

1. Leavenworth, Lansing and Pleasant Ridge have a pretty good number of high school kids wrestle during the spring and summer. Not all of them compete all the time but we usually have 20-30 kids in the room for practices.

2. You mentioned not having high school level team sports in our area such as soccer, volleyball, etc. We have some but most of the kids are forced to play on teams in the Kansas City area because of KSHSAA rules. For team sports you can only have a set number of kids from one school on your club team. The number for every sport is different but it makes it hard in our area to have enough club teams to stay in compliance with these rules, therefore kids have to go to the KC area to play on those teams.

3. I think you would be surprised at the actual number of kids playing on a variety of club teams in all sports in the Leavenworth/Lansing area. Volleyball has a great program for kids that was started by Julie Schlater, baseball has the Reds and the BlueJays (each started/supported by the respective high school coaches), basketball and track have the Force, soccer has LUSC, etc. All of these are great club programs that get our kids experience before and during high school.

4. One of the reasons you see the football fields in Johnson County is because that is a club sport down there. Their middle schools do not have football or a lot of other sports for that age group (to include wrestling).

This is not meant to get in the middle of this debate....just wanted to provide you some facts based on the way things are currently.

Bottomline: The main reason you don't see a lot of local club level team sports in our area is because of the KSHSAA rules that limit the number of kids from one high school that you can have on a team. (If you have questions on the KSHSAA rules please contact Will Cokeley as he is a great supporter of that organization and their rules...ha!)

Shawn Budke
Head Coach
Leavenworth County Spartans

PS- You talked with my son a couple of weeks ago at the Lansing soccer game.