Travius, I just did not find this statement you made about split sessions to be accurate. My son just last year completed 8 years of USAW-KS Kids wrestling and he definitely loved split tournaments. Whenever I took him to a split tournament, he would be very happy on the way home and would actually comment on how much fun the tournament was. He really loved the fast pace of the action. He did not like having to wait excessive amounts of time between matches. He absolutely loved the shorter waits between matches. He also liked having more of his day available to him to spend with his other friends from his school. I heard of this type of reaction to split tournaments from other young wrestlers too. I think we would be wrong to think that all kids love staying hours in crowded gyms to wrestle two to five matches. Maybe some kids do but definitely not all of them and I would bet the majority do not prefer it. Four to five hours in a crowded gym is more than enough time for elementary schools and middle school kids for an athletic competition.

Travius, your statement about splits just being for keeping the adults happy concerns me too. What is wrong with keeping the parents happy? Your final statement is a question of how do we keep the kids loving our sport. This makes me believe that you want to see wrestling grow in participation. Nigel Isom, another young man very dedicated to the sport like yourself, has debated with me on this forum over split tournaments and he has said he does not really care if the sport grows in numbers. I believe Nigel wants wrestling to stay the same for wrestlers and wrestling community that is so dedicated to the sport that they prefer to spend all of their day at tournaments. I think you on the other hand want the sport to grow in participation numbers. One way to do that is for their parents to keep their kids involved in the sport. Many parents who introduce their children to wrestling are new to the sport like my family was 8 years ago. They are used to coming from sports where the athletic competition is done in a hour to two hours with driving times of less than an hour total. You lose a lot of these parents and consequently the kids to wrestling in their first year or two of competition. I really believe that the length of the tournament day can contribute to losing families in the first two years of participation.


My family has come to love this sport. The last two weeks, I have attended the KU Wrestling Club's first dual of the year against Colorado and NW Mo and just a couple of nights ago my son and I were at the MU-Stanford dual home opener for MU. I really enjoyed both events. Eight years ago I would not have attended either event. I have developed an appreciation for the sport that allows me to want to stay longer at wrestling meets but it did developed over many years. If my son had not liked wrestling so much in his early years and experienced early success, it would have been very tempting to leave the sport in those first couple of years. I want to see wrestling grow in numbers and overall fan participation. I would like to see a high school and college wrestling ticket become the hardest ticket to get in town. This is a great sport for young people. I believe it is the best character building sport around. I agree with you Travius that we should talk about these issues. I just disagree with you on this notion that kids do not prefer split tournaments and that somehow we should not be concerned about keeping parents happy. I think we definitely need to if we want to see wrestling grow in popularity with the general sports public.