I think I was 5 or 6 years old when Dad took me to the second Grand State wrestling tournament, so I am certainly not well acquainted with all of the facts. But this is what I had always heard.

Grand State was a great fit for high school wrestling because it was an individual sport and did not matter whether you were the smallest or the largest school in Kansas, the best you could do was to have have one individual per team per weight. If an individual were good enough to place in his respective state division, he got the invite to Grand State. So it was an event geared toward individual success. If your team was lucky enough to have enough talent that year, you could then begin watching the scoreboard for team success.

Basketball on the other hand was a little more difficult. It is purely a team concept. The larger schools seemed to have an advantage because they had the larger population base to field a team from. And while a smaller school might be able to field a competitive starting line-up, in most cases they had difficulty in dealing with the depth of talent on a larger school's roster.

Because of this the Grand State B-ball tournament was at risk of failing and for that reason the KSHSAA chose to do away with the wrestling side too in order to keep equality between the two winter sports.

Maybe its the wrestler's mentality that I was instilled with, but I don't agree with the logic. Kind of a "if you can't beat'em, quit philosophy" on the b-ball side. Where the wrestling side appeared to relish the opportunity to compete against the best of the best. But that opens up a whole new debate.

Dalefish's arguement about western KS schools kicking tail has also been voiced frequently in our area, but may not carry a lot of water - given that Kapaun won Grand State both years of its existence.

I have never seen the actual completed brackets from the events, so I don't know how the distribution of medals or team trophies broke down. But would guess that a portion of Kapaun's success did come from their ability to recruit athletes to their program, but that is just speculation.

Again, I was not old enough to understand or care when this was going on, but I thought I would pass along what I had heard. Feel free to set me straight, if need be.

And if anyone in Topeka is listening - we'd love to see Grand State wrestling reinstated!