Travius, you know that I support your efforts to grow the Wyandotte County Kids Wrestling Club in the Kansas City Kansas community but we do not agree on this subject.

I am convinced that these long tournaments hurt the popularity of wrestling. Are we trying to get our kids away from the sport as you stated? Hardly, I like most wrestling parents and their kids spend a great deal of time both during and after the season devoted to our kids wrestling. What we might be trying to get them away from is the countless hours of unproductive time that many experience at tournaments. Parents as a rule are not attracted to sports that take 10 to 12 hours or more for your typical weekend athletic event (ask your other coach how long his day was at Atchison this year).

You strongly stated your case how the excessive costs of wrestling was hurting your efforts to recruit kids to participate with their lower cost option of basketball available. Well money isn't the only valuable commodity that parents invest in wrestling. We also invest an extraordinary amount of time in comparison to other activities. For many parents the time factor is probably more important than the cost factor. I have never even spent close to the amount of time at any youth basketball event that my kids have participated in. The time difference between basketball and wrestling probably does keep many away from participating in wrestling.

You said all this time at tournaments is time spent with your kids. Well for myself personally I have to laugh at that. Most of my time at tournaments is spent with anyone but my kid and I do spend about a half hour with him around each of his matches. I am visiting with other parents from my club or other clubs or just walking around inside or outside the facility. My son has never just sat there by me at a meet for several hours and watched other kids wrestle and talk about that with me. He spends some of it with his teammates normally outside of the gym area, but he has probably spent the majority of that time playing on the Gameboy. He has spent way more time doing that than I care for. He will be doing a lot more of that again this weekend. I would rather that he would be spending more time involved in some of the type of activities that illegalhold was describing after or before his SHORT? six hour day of wrestling at a Split State Session.

You are not going to have a match every 10 at a Split State session. We didn't have that exactly at District either. Olathewrestlingmom's son did because I believe he had a smaller bracket but my son only had one 10 match break. He was at 13, 23 and 48. I believe a split at State would have bigger match spreads due to the 16 vs. 8 kid brackets of District. You would probably get 3-4 matches in a 6 hour period at a State split session. So that is a 1.5 to 2 hour average wait between matches. I think that is ample time to recover and prepare for your next match. Watch how long it takes for the first round loser to get to their second match this Saturday. I bet it will be at least twice that long. I know my son really hates waiting that long to wrestle again. I think like Olathewrestlingmom said most kids prefer the shorter waits between matches.

To me the bottom line is if we want to make wrestling more popular we need to have all of our tournament days shortened. There are reasons that wrestling is not as popular as football, basketball or baseball with the general public. The wrestling community needs to think of what some of those reasons are and try to change them. I'm not saying that this is the sole reason but it is one of them.