Smokey, I never said anything on adding the 6&U into the mic to inflate the numbers. My thought was to do away with the 6&U state by itself and add to the State Series.
Now the state board has tried other things such as moving boundaries of the districts around to try and help this or even at least even the numbers for each district. Some were blaming the length of the season as to be burning out the kids, when at the same time some of them are also soap boxing to begin the GR/FS earlier with the reduction of the Folkstyle season. That's like saying, I don't want to eat dinner, but I am going to eat the potato chips.
Could it be the way society is right now where everyone believes that the kids deserve a participation medal, whether they win 1 match or not? Could it be leadership with in the clubs, the cost of wrestling over all, not having the right practice facilities, equipment, time? I believe no one knows for exactly why and how to fix it. I have never seen anyone post any type of participation numbers on this subject so I felt obliged to do the research and post them up as to why we are dropping sub-districts. Everyone can say the numbers are dropping but some of us like to see the numbers. That's all. This was not intended to rile anyone up.
Another thing as you brought up, we need to concentrate on KANSAS first before looking or trying to compare the national numbers in with us. We can't believe we are going to fix the national numbers without fixing our piece of the pie 1st. We need to focus on the Kids Wrestling. This is the feeder to Middle and High School programs. We need to focus on us first before looking at national numbers. We cant fix other states.