Who Should You Take to Tournaments?

Regarding tournaments, trust me. Those dastardly weekend events are meat grinders for children. Only the strong survive intact. As for the rest of the entrants, mostly rookies, I have a suggestion for coaches, and the parents.

Match your athletes’ experiences, and maturity level, with the events you plan to attend.

Contrary to popular belief, character is not developed when your son, daughter, or your team gets dragged out to the woodshed.

As an suggestion; coaches should label each tournament they plan to attend by their level of difficultly. A Level 1 event is for beginners, a Level-5 event is one you may want to tie your shoes a little tighter for.

Coaches need to label each of their wrestlers in the same way.

Then the parents as well because coaches tend to exaggerate their wrestler’s capabilities. From a parenting perspective, use the number of months your son or daughter has been wrestling and combine it with the wrestler’s tenacity level. There’s no specific yard stick you can buy at Walmart that will give you a precise measurement, so, just do your best.

What’s your gut feeling?

Parents tend to know where their offspring are in their development by the words they hear before, during and after each practice.

Those who are at Level 1 should never attend Level 3 tournaments or higher. Doing so is not a character developing experience. Don’t buy into the hype that losing is somehow noble, or that tough love grows champions. It’s more child abuse than character development.

The point I’m trying to make for coaches and parents is you can only teach the children that are present at practices, not the ones that’ve already quit.

Abusing the unprepared doesn’t help anyone.

The sport, especially for novices, is a multi-year jog, not a sprint.

Coaching a team is very similar to teaching in a classroom. A coach should develop lesson plans based on the middle 60% of the talent in the room. Then have alternative plans for the athletes on each of the opposite ends of that spectrum.

A basic coaching principle is . . . your athletes will stop following you when they’re repeatedly pushed into situations that are above their abilities. That’s how programs start in the Fall with 74 wrestlers and end 2 months later with 31.

The simple way to evaluate any program; don’t look at the number of trophies a coach points to as being indicative of his coaching prowess and success with children. Ask how many wrestlers did he start with, and how many were in the room at the end of the season?

Whether you agree or not, which is up to you, first year wrestlers shouldn’t attend any tournaments in my opinion; period!

Don’t buy into the notion that all the athletes in your son’s division are the same age, so the competition is equal. Not true! They all may be 9-year-olds, but 20% of them might have been wrestling for 4 or 5 years, and your son for 4 or 5 weeks. Age and weight isn’t near as important as years of experience.

In closing, wrestling is an amazing sport. It teaches those who experience the practices and share in the hardships something you won’t find anywhere else in the world.