This is going to be a bit long but since the door is opened, here's my 2 cents......
I also come from Montana and agree with what Mike said. I submit that the biggest difference is that our kids season was only 3 months long (Jan to March) and we wrestled freestyle, not folkstyle in kids club.
Given the way things are here in KS, I offer these thoughts....
1. I am not sure if I agree with the dedication on the kids or coaches comments. I think we have bunch of people dedicated to the sport of wrestling. I think the season my be too long. We start practice in November and go to the end of March (that's folkstyle), then you transition into freestyle/greco from Apr to July, throw in a camp or two during the summer, now start pre-season training (Aug to Oct) for those not playing football, etc. Do you need to do this to AA at Fargo.....absolutely. The challenge becomes time and resources for coaches and parents. I think if the folkstyle season for kids were shorter, then more would do freestyle and greco. This in turn would help their experience base when they get to be Cadets.
2. I would like to see more emphasis put on a "grassroots" training program for coaches that focuses on freestyle and greco. One of the reasons we don't see the # of clubs offering freestyle/greco is because we lack experience for coaching.
Proposed Solution: Establish a "Train the Trainer" type program. This involves establishing a baseline of freestyle and greco technique that we want all the kids to know. Get a group of experienced coaches and develop teams of trainers that can teach other coaches this technique and how to coach it at practices. Develop a teaching methodology that can be taught to these new coaches. These teaching teams then could go to clubs that want to start or improve thier freestyle/greco programs. The focus would be on training coaches. We could leave them with practice plans and dvd's so they can review and refresh once the clinic is over.
I think this would help train the coaches and grow the freestyle/greco training base in our state.
2. Establish regional freestyle/greco training sites. This would allow us to share coaches and the workload. This would also allow us to bring in upper level athletes to offer clinics. I think bringing in Lindsay Durlacher was an awesome idea. It would be great to be able to offer a 3-5 day freestyle/greco clinic and bring in that level of instruction. We are spoiled in NE KS because we have one of the best (Erik Akin) that helps a lot of the kids in this geographic area.
This is a lot of rambling but if we really want to improve our freestlyle/greco then there are 2 issues we must resolve....
1. Length of folkstyle season. Too long, too many resources for coaches, kids and parents in order to then do freestyle.
2. Improve freestyle/greco coaching base so more clubs feel comfortable offering freestyle/greco.
Just my thoughts.
Shawn Budke
