Crash99,

You make some good points. I definitely agree with you that it is very important to ease the parents and kids into the sport in the first two years. But I do think it is still important even after that. My son started wrestling open tournaments after his first 1.5 years of competition in his second year. He started wrestling most of his split tournaments in his last four years of competition. Actually for him I think as he got older, his tolerance for spending all day in a gym to wrestle 3 to 4 matches diminished. Those times that he would comment favorably about how much he liked wrestling in split tournaments occurred in his last two years (when he was a 7th and 8th grader). He was entering his teenage years and was probably wanting to spend some more time with his other teenage friends and less time around all the younger kids in the gym. He truly loved not having to wait so long between matches. He said he really liked it when he could just get a shorter amount of rest and get right back into wrestling a match. I think it takes them out of their competitive rhythm when they have to wait too long between matches. Actually I think there are more open tournaments than split tournaments in Kansas, especially in District 2. The only one I know of in our District 1 besides the District tournament itself is Mill Valley.

I just want to clarify one of your statements about slit tournaments not being good for the experienced wrestler. In Nebraska, they have been having more and more of their tournaments held in the split format. There is no rule that says you have to leave the gym because your son/daughter is not wrestling. The only difference is that with split tournaments is that if you want to leave, you can. Or if you want to wait until later in the day to come, you can. Most of the elite wrestlers are still there all day and the kids still maintain friendships with the other wrestlers who they see at the tournaments. The matches are closer together so there is not the hours spent roaming around the gym or waiting until your next match comes up. As a spectator who loves to watch wrestling, I actually prefer watching split tournaments better. Reason #1: all of the same age kids are wrestling at around the same time. #2: there usually is not as many mat's needed so you can watch all of the action. #3: you can actually follow an individual wrestler better since the matches are closer in time and the amount of kids are split up whereas at an open tournament, you have no idea when a person's next match will be if they are not in your bracket and with all the different mats, you tend to miss matches #4: you have the freedom to do something if you want to. You can actually relax in the concession stand and visit with friends without having to worry about watching the mat numbers. #5: if you have something else you plan on doing that day (like going to your daughter's basketball game)-you can. #6: slit formats actually remind me of junior high and high school dual's. You have the younger kids in the morning and the older/more experienced kids in the afternoon. #7: there is not so much waiting at weigh-in or for your medal's at the head table as this is not something that is to be done in a few hours but is spread out throughout the day. #8: with split formats, you don't have the fact of clubs using multiple gyms during the same time (big kids in one gym and little kids in the other)
If you have never been to a split tournament-you should. I strongly suggest everyone attend one.

I think I hit a nerve when I mentioned parents; maybe I should expand on my intentions...

I am 24 and dont have kids of my own. I didnt wrestle in kids club till I was 14 after my freshman year of high school... Honestly I think the USA Wrestling programs is the best kept secret in KS... With that said my hit on parents was mostly from a coaching point of view... After reading some of the post I can def see how the split session format can be more tolerable for novice parents and wrestlers alike... I know in my area (Kansas City) alot of parents are ignorant to wrestling... just flat out dont understand it... when their kids come home and say momma or daddy I wanna wrestle most their parents get images if WWE or some type or brutal blood bath sport, or worse... For my middle school every year I hold a chili supper with the wrestlers and parents to go over the basics of wrestling... I guess from the outside lookin in, if you didnt know anything about wrestling it would be a hard sport to watch and understand...

I had my first middle school dual of the year on Saturday (wish kids club could do duals). It was great to see so many parents then yellin and encouraging their kids on. As you know duals only last 60 min and a double dual is about 3 hours.. so we were done at noon.

I guess as a parent showing up and yelling and encouraging your kid for an hour or 2 is much easier than all day. Plus many clubs wouldn't function at all without parental support. I know my club have a few wrestling moms who we couldnt do what we do without.

I would like to formulate a series of recommendations that would help parents and club leaders. I know its not my intention to tell anyone else how to run their club, but I know as new clubs form or leadership changes hands, this information could be vital in decision making.

Travius:

I am very impressed by how you promote wrestling in your community. You should discuss some of your ideas with Ned Price our State's competition director. Ned spent a great deal of time this past year interviewing people and formulating a comprehensive plan to help move our youth program forward. I believe that most of it was not approved at this year's State Board meeting but maybe the groundwork was laid for possible future changes. You might want to talk to him about your ideas and to listen to him about his ideas too.

The only problems I have against split format tournaments (younger kids in the morning, Older kids in the afternoon type) is 1. Which age groups do we split up? and 2. Different ages being split up incorrectly.

Let me clarify. I have seen some split format tourneys have the 6U, 8U, 14U in the morning with 10U, 12U and 16U in the afternoon. This poses a couple of problems while in the same breath it helps the tourney flow better and keeps parents happy and unhappy at the same time. There will be differing opinions on either side of this issue, but for the sake of discussion lets just talk about the issues with the above forementioned split.

Having 2 kids wrestling, one in 8U and one in 10U would discourage myself from attending this hypothetical split tournament, simply because I would have to be there all day for both my kids. I am certain that this situation probably happens a lot when a family has multiple wrestlers in the family.

From a different point of view, I prefer not to have my 6U 43lb kid wrestling on a mat next to a 14U 190lb match. simply because of the closeness to each other on the mats and the dangers of possibly getting my wrestler hurt.

Now I know that these would be extreme examples but the possibility does exist of this happening.

Also, my sons like to watch the older boys compete at that elite level and I agree that waiting for 3 hours between matches is a bit long for any wrestler to keep his competitive edge.

In fact just last week at the tournament in Morrison, Oklahoma, my son had his first match about an hour from the start time then waited 3 hours for his next match, then since they were trying to speed things up and moving match number to different matches the time between his 2nd match and his 3rd match was about 2 matches in between or a total of 10 minutes. This was obviously a messed up situation, since going from losing in his second match put him on the backside of the bracket and the match numbers were a bit too close, and he was drained emotionally and physically from his second match it showed in his 3rd match. There needs to be a happy medium there, but enough about my ranting.

I just want to clarify that I do support split tournaments for all Novice and Open tournaments alike, so long as they run it properly. And I would also like to say that I believe that the "Nebraska format" I spoke about in an earlier reply should be looked at more in an effort of keeping these kids and their parents in the sport longer, and always remember that we do this for the kids sake!

The split tournaments that we have attended had 6U, 8U and 10U in the morning. 12U, 14U and 16U were in the afternoon. You still were done at around the same time as an open tournament so if you had sons in both you would get home at about the same time. In Fairbury NE, the same age kids wrestle at the same time. They have 4 to 6 mats and all the 6U wrestle and then all the 8U ect. The kids are split up according to weight. In fact, what they do is call all kids in the same age group to go upstairs where parents arrange them in rows based on weight. You sit next to the kids in your bracket and wait your turn when they call you down to the mats. Now, that is just one tournament but it is run very smoothly.

Again, there is nothing to prevent you from staying to watch the older kids. You actually can then sit back and enjoy the show without worry about mat numbers.

I have heard people say that it makes a coaches job harder because they have to stay the whole day. Well, how many open tournaments did you go to last year that were done by 2:00? Exactly. I know that my husband looked forward to the Fairbury tournament because it was easier for the coaches to keep up with the kids and they didn't have to worry so much about not being there for a match (or two kids at the same time). Also, he wasn't jumping from a 6U match to a 14U in a few minutes. It was less crowded and less confusion.
I feel that the strong oppositions to the split-format is that it just isn't done at Kansas. We get stuck in "well we have always done it this way" mentality and are scared to try something new. Also, we are thinking about what it was like when we are kids without thinking about everybody else. Just because you liked to sit in the gym and play with your friends does not mean everyone else did too. If everyone thought the same way as you, we wouldn't have so many people dropping out when they get older.

I was mainly speaking about the sub-district and district qualifying tournaments when i spoke about the 8U 10U and 16U being in the morning , Not sure which districts did this format, but I know that it was a headache for us in District 2 when we saw the split like that.

That's what our district voted to do last year. The biggest problem for us as tournament directors is moving matches. With a split format, the match numbers are too close together so, we have to let the matches run out. With this format it is very hard to get out early. We are running a straight through tournament for our district, and, no doubt we will get done earlier. Henry and I have some great results with moving matches. Our tournament last year had 510 kids and we were done at 2:30. 4 years ago we had 1350 kids in Topeka and were done with mats being loaded on trailers by 5:30. There's no way we can do that with a split tournament when the afternoon session starts at 1:00 or later. We do mat management for a lot of tournaments and highly discourage it for those reasons. If you have a split format tournament with those kind of numbers and get finished by that time of day, I can only say one thing. Great job.

Run that by me again as to why the age splits were a headache? I'm in district 2 and this is the first I've heard of it.

The split tournaments were never designed to be easier/shorter on the host clubs or workers. The intent of course, was to get the over-whelming majority of parents and wrestlers home in a reasonable amount of time. If your club is looking for something to do that is easy, I would suggest selling candy bars or something. There are already too many poorly ran tournaments by clubs/parents who seem to want to be somewhere else.

The club your children participate with has successfully run an Invitational Tournament with the split tournament format for several years.

This same club, in years past, has been selected to host both the District II Sub-district and District tournaments and successfully utilized the split tournament format for these events.

Hosting a tournament has inherent problems and headaches, however in my humble opinion, for the last ten years (with one exception), this format has served the District II qualifying tournaments well.

Im not saying that split tournaments are a bad thing, I am just stating some of the opinions that I have heard from others about the different issues with tournament formats. I have heard many parents get discouraged by both formats and have heard the following comments about non-split tournaments a lot of times. One parent came up to me last year during a tournament and was talking about the time spent in the gym waiting hours between matches to see their kid wrestle for 10 seconds either because he/she got pinned quickly or he/she pinned their opponent quickly. I can certainly understand that from both sides of the issue. Last year at the start of the year we would wait hours to watch my son wrestle and then get pinned in less than 30 seconds. In freestyle-greco we would wait for hours to see my son pin his opponent in 10 seconds. I can remember one tournament this summer where I actually told my son to not get the pin so quickly and work on his moves and technique a little bit and earn the tech-fall.

Anyway my earlier point is dead and all I am saying is that we need to try to keep the kids in the sport longer. If that means we accomodate parents and wrestlers alike by changing the formats of our tournaments to suit the desires of the mass public then we need to be willing to bend and make the necessary changes. I personally think that my family has become a wrestling family and we love to sit in the gym at a tournament all day watching all of the kids wrestle, not just our own.

What do u think about the cost of kids tournaments? Most of them are reasonable but the cost has increased the past 5 years. When I first started my club (2000)

Novice... $8
Open... $10
Marjor Open $15

Now I see novice tournament at $12-15... I never ran a kids tournaments before and therefore dont completely understand the cost involved in running a tournament but i do know the increased cost of tournament will eventually be a deterant.


(excuse the typos)

Especially when you have 4 kids. It really adds up!

Hey that you CAN'T blame on the tournament hosts!

Okay, you got me.

I do have to say that everything is going up. We try to have at least one of us home everynight and the other go to the event/game just because we can't afford to pay admission tickets for 6 people anymore. Not to mention concession stand ect. It is really hard when you average 4 to 5 games a week (junior high girls basketball/high school wrestling/kids fed wrestling). We just cut back on a lot of things. This year, with the price of gas and the increase in tournament fees, we will only go to half of the tournaments that we went to last year. We just can't afford to go every weekend.

Travius:

I agree that this is an area of concern. Cost can drive people away from participation in any sport and wrestling is no exception. Everyone has to make choices and put personal limits on themselves. I am sure some people find it so difficult financially that they can only let their children compete during the middle school season if their school offers a program. Only wrestling at the middle school level would not be as beneficial as wrestling in our USAW-KS schedule after the middle school season is completed.

I am not sure if our USAW-KS organization offers assistance to clubs from lower income areas to help kids afford to compete in USAW meets, but that would be worth looking into. I would suggest contacting Ned Price our State Competition Director or Mike Juby our State Director on that possibility. Another suggestion would be to consider running a tournament as a fundraiser. You might want to meet with Sean McCarthy (STA club) or Jeff Broadbent (Mill Valley) for suggestions on how to successfully run a tournament.

I know that our club offers scholarships for wrestlers meeting certain qualifications. It is the opinion of the club that no kid should be denied the chance to participate due to financial constraints. We also have a lot of donated gear (shoes, headgear, etc.) which we gladly lend out. In fact at the start of the year, the coaches tell all of the beginning parents not to go right out and buy 60-130$ shoes because there are usually several pairs at the start of the year that the club has to lend out.

Of course I am talking about a very large club with over 109 carded kids in the club so far and I do know that smaller clubs probably dont have the financial means to offer scholarships and what not like we do, but that is a possibility for different clubs to look into as the costs continually go up and the burden becomes more and more taxing on the parents.

Recently in the Wichita Eagle they had an article on the cost of the various kids sports. Not once was wrestling mentioned in this article, but I have to believe that wrestling should have been mentioned in this article. I believe the article was mentioned before in these forums.

Below is the link to both the forum discussion about it and the article itself.

http://www.usawks.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=003528#000000

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/sports/12119632.htm

While going thru kids wrestling i saw various
equations and formulas as to running an efficient
tournament. In my opinion, the split format, if
properly organized works great. How is it that one club can host a qualifier and send everyone home by 5:10 pm and then others still struggle
with matches running well past 7:00 pm.
I have seen my share and some of my cousins that I go and watch at qualifiers are fed up.
I do believe if given the proper direction and
expertise any club can pull this format off.
It goes with poor planning and not enough help.
In District II, previous years, District Qualifi-
ers have gone a little crazy. 2005 Augusta, out time-8:00 pm, 2004 Winfield, out time-8:45 pm,
2003 Augusta out-time 5:30 pm, 2002 Derby, out-time 6:00. I guess some know how to handle it and some can't. What & where is the solution.
I have several relatives that go and watch my
younger cousins every year, just trying to get some insight as to preparing for a long day
or some weird surprises! Mulvane what's your
gameplan so far?