Affordable yes, cheap no. As someone said earlier you can spend $150 to get started and go to a couple of tournaments. I'm willing to invest that money in my sons. It's a sport worth the time and money. Where I have been drawing the line is when tournaments are price gouging, and doing things that make it more difficult for us to attend. It's a great sport but you have to choose those tournaments that give you the best bang for the buck.

We've attended tournaments from Hays to Topeka and Concordia to Wichita. I guess this is as good a place as any to give my opinion on which tournaments have worked out well for us over the past 13 years.

Lincoln-A, Abilene-A, Beloit-A, Salina-A, Manhattan-B, Ellsworth-B, Great Bend-B, Herington-A, Buhler-A, Chapman-A, P-burg-B, Junction City-B, Concordia-A, Minneapolis-B, Rice Co-A.

If your going to spend most of a Saturday somewhere the clubs above have done well making it worth your while.

There are those tournaments in our that I try not to support. I realize people are working hard to make tournaments run well but there are places that consistantly charge too much money, make kids wait far too long, have rude tournament directors and poor accomidations. These are the places that make me feel wrestling is just too expensive.

Wrestling is like everything else these days, you must be an educated consumer. Let your money do your talking and support the those tournaments that are do their best to make Saturdays fun, competitive, and worth spending your time and money at.

This is to TRAVIUS at wycowrestling: My husband and I also feel that the sport has much more to offer than just a few wrestling tournaments and a few medals. We sponsored a couple of boys this year and hope to sponsor more kids. These boys were 12 year olds and was never exposed to wrestling until middle school when they were able to wrestle and play basketball. Also I am glad to say they have chosen wrestling over basketball and are doing extremely well for their first year. I also wanted to say that my son, who is 14 and under 100lbs, wrestled one of your kids Saturday at Burlington. It was a great match and your guy won by one point. After the match, the boys got together and talked about their match and made friends. I think you and I both know that this is the benefit of wrestling.

I live in Wisconsin and this is what we have done locally. Cost has been and is always a concern here too. To help offset this cost we have started something else to supplement the regular tournaments. Each club (4 of us so far) will get together with another club and wrestle just before the local high school matches. The only cost is to get there, which half the time it is at your own school. This also gives more of a chance for the beginners to get some mat time before going to a tournament. When a team comes they bring a list of age, weight, and skill level for all the kids to help with the matching up. The high school kids get involved by refereeing, keeping time, score, etc. So far it has gone very well. We have tried to do more than two clubs at a time, but it doesn't work very well, given the time constraint of the high school match starting. When we first started, we had kids that were afraid of going to tournaments. After going to a couple of these, they had the confidence to start tournament play. This is just our way of trying to work around some people’s concern about cost.

Brent