Originally posted by Chief Renegade:
[QUOTE]... That's why other top wrestling states overwhelmingly disagree with you. Their freestyle and greco teams have an entire month head start on us and we end up playing catch-up or not wrestling freestyle at all.
Eric Johnson
Eric, The KWCA approached Mike Juby and the Kids Executive Board with this concern in 2002. The minutes from the USAW Kansas Kids Wrestling State Body Meeting on 11/3/2002 stated the following:
"The KWCA had approached Mike and said that they would like to see the Kids wrestling season end earlier. They would like to see it end before High School State, take a couple weeks break, and then start the summer freestyle – Greco-roman season. They honestly feel we are going too long!! A brief decision followed, but it was decided to leave as is."
There was a topic in the Kids forum that Brett Shoffner introduced on March 30, 2004 called "A few thoughts in general" where Brett and Jeremy Gibson came out in strong support of this idea. You can easily get to this topic by going to the Search on this website, type in KWCA and use the option to narrow your search to the Kids forum. You will find this topic and a few others that shows this idea has been discussed about every year for the last five years.
I believe it would be an extremely difficult thing to change in our Kansas Kids system. From my perspective the support to keep the system the same appears to be overwhelming.
Eric, I just wanted to point this out to you so you and others on this topic can see that there are other wrestling people who agree with you that maybe there is a better way to help our Kansas wrestlers develop their wrestling skills.
You are not the only one to suggest that we need to get our high schoolers involved in freestyle earlier and that having them wrestle folkstyle too long increases their burnout rate and ends up discouraging them from participating in freestyle.
The same burnout issue could also keep the younger Kids wrestlers from participating in freestyle too.
