Good topic Mike. I am not sure how much a particular facility makes or breaks a program. Pratt has managed to produce a good number of studs despite their archaic training facilitiy, but it sounds like you are way overdue for an over haul, nonetheless. Santa Fe Trail has a unique situation in which they basically have their own training compound, which is nice, but as Travis mentioned, forces them to bus to and from practice, yet they produce tough teams year after year. Baldwin is similair in which Coach Harris has converted an old elementary school into a practice facility, which is very nice also, but he also deals with transportation issues, yet he's been able to develop a great program out of Baldwin. In my first years at Tonganoxie, we bused to and from the fair ground building in town and had to roll out and rollup the mats each practice so as not to interfere with the "Tongie Twirlers" who practiced there each night. One time I remember arriving at practice only to discover tens of thousands of boxes of girl scout cookies covering our practice area. So we rolled out one little section of mat off to the side and did what we could. In hind sight I guess this is kind of funny and part of the character building that goes into wrestling.

Now at Eudora, after having just built a brand new school, we have a wrestling room that accomodates five sections of mat and is adjacent to a HammerStrength-filled weight room that we use for 45-minutes every day. Will this facility make us any better as a program? Well, that depends on how willing the athletes are to use the facilities that we have. This would be true for any program. I have seen some great programs developed out of schools using nothing more that a converted classroom for a practice room and sandbags for lifting. I know of many schools that still use their stages for practice facilities and love telling stories of how so-and-so threw so-and-so off the ledge. I am sure many Pratt wrestlers have old war stories about getting thrown into a concrete support are two.

Facilities can help give a lot of pride to a program and be a nice show piece for the school, but you know as well as I do that that doesn't always translate into getting kids to come out for sports. Does that mean that I would give up the room that I have now? No way! Not a chance. For now, my athletes are going to have to deal with telling stories about getting hurled into heavily padded walls. Now where's the fun in that?

Happy Holidays to everyone in the wrestling community!