Originally Posted By: Jason Puderbaugh
Lots of good points in this discussion thread. Just one other good idea is getting our youth competitions more excited and family/fan friendly with creating a season dual schedule between clubs or a creating youth leagues and having a dual schedule between all of the clubs in your league. Got to sell wrestling to the families in the communities and once its sold to them, they will get their kids involved in the sport and become fans of the sport. Why do more people go to watch basketball and football games, because they have scheduled times that people show up on Friday nights and watch the games. If club directors could get together and establish club dual schedules then use the schools to funnel out the season club dual schedules to all of the families to where it becomes the norm to want to make it out to watch little Jonny's dual just like they do little Jonny's soccer, football and basketball games then we would be on the right track. Fact is wrestling is a tough sport for the kids but even tougher for the parents who have to spend their entire Saturdays/Sundays sitting all day to watch a total of 9 - 12 minutes of wrestling at best over an 8-10 hour day in the bleachers of a gym. Yes, split sessions help that but not for families who have siblings/multiple kid wrestling in both sessions and volunteer youth coaches. You still have tournaments on the schedule of course, but atleast then our sport can reach out into the community to more then just the die hards. Then over time this will funnel into the HS's where more people in the community will want to come to watch HS duals as well because they are familiar with the excitement from the youth program duals.


I've officiated HS Varsity Duals at school such as Rose Hill, Buhler, Andover and Andover Central where they'll have their Thursday night HS Varsity duals divided up into sections and intersperse youth matches right in the middle of things! Talk about an awesome environment for those kids and families! I know it gives me goosebumps when those little guys are hammering it out in a packed gym and it's louder than all get out!


Shane Koranda
Towanda, Ks.