Houses are selling all around in Belleville right now. You still have your house on the market. That is surprising. I hope it sells soon for you as that has to be very tough

Being from a small team is very difficult. I would like to see the community come together and get things back to the way it was in belleville. I think their is enough wrestlers out their in their community to come together and show support but putting together a good kids program and talking the sport up. Belleville use to be one of the best around and hopefully the community can come together and get thing rolling again

Yes our house is still for sale. It is a beautiful house that would be perfect for first time owners or a retired couple. We do have renters but they are always late in paying. It is hard with two house payments but oh well. The best thing Belleville can do is to positively talk up the program. The more it is talked about the better people will see it. I know that even in Chapman, people don't talk about wrestling like they do basketball. We are trying to increase support and to increase the number of kids who do kids wrestling. We have been stressing the "family" aspect of wrestling by supporting all of the kids during matches and in a tradition of eating out together whenever a tournament or duel is over. It is in getting these parents and kids involved that brings up the high school program.

I've heard that Hoxie has had one of the best wrestler to student ratios.

When I was at Immaculata, we never had more than 15 kids out at any one time, but I always promoted that "family" atmosphere. We all dined together after tournaments and we even had a couple of "parents" parties after our tournament.

Sadly, that kind of died off after I left and I understand that they've dropped the program now, but I truly think that held us together in those days.

Right now i think we like 14 or so out which is horrible for a 5A school. Plus we are doubled up at a few weights so we have opens like crazy. In our last duel we gave up around 40 points merely to opens.

Funny thing is that some of the big schools in Iowa are going through the same thing. We were in a tournament last month that had a bunch of 3A (Kansas and 6A and 5A) schools in it. One of them brought four kids and the other six. It's far from just a Kansas problem.

My team (K.C. Washington) brings about 3-4 wrestlers to every tournament because of injuries and a few other reasons.

Flinthills is a 1A school and they only have about 7 kids and continually finish last at almost every tournament. but the kids are good kids and fun to have at tourneys if not still a few decent kids

Wichita East has like 10 wrestlers?

Another small team that i've seen this year. It would have to Osborne High School they have a total of 4 wreslters. We dualed them right after christmas and they only had 2 wrestling that wrestled. Which happened to fall in our open spots, so it went pretty quick.

If wrestling was easy there would be no baskeball. Take that from a baller with a kid wrestling.