John,

I like what you posted. There will be times that things don't start out that way but hopefully shake out well by time a high school team comes together.

When my son started at the age of 6 there was one club in town. By the time the next season rolled around that club had fractured into three clubs. We stayed with the original club, a club that I had been a volunteer coach for three years while I was attending college. It pretty much stayed a Novice caliber club the next two years, continued to go downhill and the best partners my son had to wrestle with quit. We made a choice to wrestle for another club that was 30 minutes away because they had eight or nine good to very good wrestlers that were near my son's age and weight.

After practicing and wrestling tournaments for this club for 5 years (including a year I was deployed and my wife had to take our 5 and almost 1 year old along to practices), Junior High started. Garrett's team in Junior High wrestled for four Kids' clubs in the area, along with your traditional wrestlers that just picked the sport up in Junior High. They came together and were city champions both years. We had to make a very tough choice to join a local club that many of his Junior High teammates joined after the 7th grade season because we knew that these were the guys that he would be teammates with through High School. They stayed together through thick and thin and during his High School career finished in the top 10 all four years including a 3rd place finish at State his sophomore year (the best finish an LHS team ever had).

To this day, we are grateful that we had the opportunity to wrestle those five years with a great club. The team that came together from those four Kids' programs were blood brothers on and for the most part off the mat. Sometimes things happen for a reason and in the end turn out very well.