How to grow participation in competitive wrestling in the United States
This article is about growing wrestling participation by capturing the wider market: all children and their families. To do this, wrestling needs to become friendly and inviting to outsiders. Some of these ideas will contradict things that we’ve “always done this way,” but I hope you can keep an open mind and try to imagine things from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about wrestling or it’s culture. Wrestling has a very rich culture, but it is confusing to newcomers and not nearly as welcoming as it could be.
My strategy for growing participations consists of 4 components:
- Knowing what we’re up against
- Obtaining the critical mass
- Identifying our weaknesses
- Making wrestling events more fun than other sporting events.
Knowing what we’re up against
To grow participation in wrestling (for boy and girls), we should first examine our competition. Although kids are distracted by video games, television, social media, etc., those distractions are not our primary competitors. Our competitors are football, baseball, soccer, dance, gymnastics, cheerleading, theater, swimming lessons, studying a musical instrument, etc. Most parents make sure their children participate in extracurricular activities, but there is only enough time to try a few. By the time a child reaches 12 years old, their schedule has become more rigid, and they are less likely to try new activities.
Barriers to late-entry participants
In addition to having less time, many extracurricular activities create barriers to late-entry due to the participants being too far behind to catch-up. If you are surrounded by other beginners, you are more likely to continue; if everyone is an expert except you, catching up might not be worth the work.
The difficulty of late-entry depends on the activity. You can begin and enjoy piano at any age, while wrestling is practically impossible to begin as an adult. Ladder-style wrestling tournaments (elimination tournaments to crown a single champion) are a barrier to late-entry participants: the newbies are fodder for the champions. The late-entry barrier is worse in wrestling than almost all other activities, because wrestling is physically painful.
Takeaways:
- Younger children have more free time and are more open to trying new experiences.
- Many activities “indoctrinate” their participants, and prevent them spending their time elsewhere.
- Late entry is difficult in wrestling due to the way we structure competitions.
Obtaining the critical mass
Establishing a wrestling program can be very difficult before you reach a critical mass – the minimum number of participants necessary for the program to grow. You can’t start a wrestling program with 1 wrestler because without good training partners they will not continue to show up for practice. You cannot start a program with 10 wrestlers who are widely spread in ages/weights; it will collapse due to a lack of quality matchups.
You can build a wrestling program with only 4 wrestlers who are close in size/age/skill, but they will quickly become too advanced to allow new wrestlers to integrate; this program will not pull newbies into wrestling, but will grow by cannibalizing existing wrestling programs. Elite teams grow by recruiting kids who already wrestle; they rarely build from scratch, as it’s difficult for brand new wrestlers to survive in these rooms (it’s too rough/physical, and the kids are already too advanced; it’s not fun for the lowest guy on the totem pole).
The Ideal Critical Mass
In my opinion, the ideal critical mass is a handful of five-year-olds. These are your puppies, who one day will become great wrestlers, but for now the only goal is to provide them with a fun (and safe!) athletic experience. The reason I choose 5 year olds is because their parents are still very open to trying new activities; Also, their parents’ social circles consist of other parents of 5-year-olds, who are still looking for activities to get their children involved in. Word of mouth is far more powerful at this age.
Once a critical mass of wrestlers is reached, the program will continue to grow on it’s own through world of mouth. By focusing on younger kids, we “sink our hooks into them” before other extracurricular activities get the chance.
Don’t get too big!
It is a mistake to let a single class grow too large. If a 5 year old group grows to 20-25 kids, you will not be able to do a good job protecting them from one another… A hard slam can be a traumatic experience for a 5 year old, he may become very scared, and may never want to wrestle again. Preventing excessive roughness is the most important thing a coach can do while working with 5 years olds; don’t worry, they will get tougher as the years go by. You are not fit to be a youth wrestling coach if you cannot provide a fun and SAFE experience for ALL of the wrestlers.
Instead of growing too large, continuously split the program, keeping the group between 6-12 wrestlers; you will eventually have multiple sessions that accommodate children of a wide variety of skills and weights. You will have an appropriate group to place incoming wrestlers of every weight, age, and skill. This strategy is not easy money, but this strategy can grow.
How I built my 5 year old program:
I told everyone I knew that I was starting a program for 5 year old wrestlers, and provided a starting date 2 months in advance. Once a week, we would be playing wrestling based games, getting kids physically fit, and preparing them to learn wrestling (in a year or two); I assured them it would be FUN and SAFE. We started with 40 minutes and worked our way up to an hour after the first few practices. The first few would be free, and then I would figure out an affordable price once I knew what we were working with. We started with 6 kids, and after 2 weeks I asked parents to pay $50/month (This is very inexpensive for Long Island. A 1x/week gymnastics class will cost $100/month); they all happily agreed.
To spread the word further, I created some simple marketing videos and a webpage, and used social media and google adwords to promote the program. The budget has always been small, as I do not want fast growth.
As more kids entered the program, and the critical mass was solidified, I increased the number of days we would meet (shrinking the mass), and slowly increased the monthly cost for new members. We have since split the groups several times. I have always attempted to provide the best value so that parents feel they are in on the “best kept secret.” I’d rather have more wrestlers than more money.
There are many other strategies I’ve used to grow my program, including incentive strategies to attract and keep quality coaches, and social events to solidify friendships between teammates and their families. I will write about these another time.
Identifying our weaknesses
The flaws in our competitions:
I believe it is almost solely the fault of our competitions that prevent wrestling from reaching the popularity of sports like soccer. Let’s look at the negatives of wrestling events from the lense of a new parent (who never wrestled) as they experience their first youth wrestling tournament. Many of these things that are obvious to you, are not obvious to new parents.
Cons:
- Parents deal with more anxiety in wrestling competitions than any other sport. There are a variety of reasons why wrestling tournaments are anxiety inducing for parents…
- Registration is very confusing. What skill level should they register? Are they novice or intermediate (the names of age divisions!)? What if they are a little bit over their weight class, that’s ok right? Every participant may have a different start time. In soccer the whole team meets at once, no registration.
- Bracketing and mat assignments are very confusing. Many parents are completely lost in this process. “He’s got BYE next!” “how long will the wait be?” “He lost, do we go home now?” “what are brackets? How do I read these?” “what website do I have to go to?” Compare it to soccer: we lose, no contest.
- Mismatches are the norm in wrestling. It’s so ingrained in our culture, that we don’t even realize how bad we are at matching kids up. Since it’s always been done this way, we continue to do it this way… One kid dominating another is not good for either competitor, or for the parents, who are often more humiliated/frustrated than their children. It feels unfair, “my son is a beginner, he should only be wrestling other beginners.” We have expressions for dealing with this like “if it were easy, everyone would wrestle,” “keep trying, he’ll get tougher,” “my son went through it too” instead of realizing that this is a problem that needs a creative solution.
- Wrestling competitions take much longer than other sports. We’ve gotten used to spending long period of time in the gym, it is our norm. Even our rapidfire tournaments take a few hours, while youth soccer matches take a little over an hour.
- Separating competitors by weight classes have many negative consequences: More stress for the parent/athlete (deciding on the proper weight class, worrying about missing weight), feeling like you need to “cut weight” just to keep up (one of the biggest problems in wrestling), crash dieting and dehydrating is a miserable experience that causes many wrestlers to look forward to the season being over.
So, in summation, many parents first experience at a wrestling tournament is a frustrating and anxiety filled day that takes hours, involves a lot of nervous waiting around, to watch their kid get physically dominated in a mismatch, only to be pacified that “if they stick with it, it will get better.” If you compare this experience to those of other sports, wrestling does not come out on top.
Making wrestling events more fun than other sporting events
How to make wrestling competitions fun events for the whole family:
I imagine a future where wrestling events are large festivals that hold matches in Folkstyle, Freestyle, Greco Roman, Jiu Jitsu, Judo, and other synergistic sports; while also offering entertainment for the whole family. We want non-wrestling little sisters to be engaged and having a good time. Wrestling competitions should be fun social events first and foremost, plus there’s wrestling! Other sports don’t have downtime, perhaps the wait-times between matches is an asset in disguise!
A solution to the logistical nightmare of running a wrestling tournament:
I’ve spent the past year developing a new technology, and methodology, for running competitions that will solve all of the issues listed above. It’s called W.A.R. Zone and it will revolutionize wrestling in America.
W.A.R. Zone is not a tournament and it does not crown a champion; but it is the fastest way create quality wrestling matches for all skill levels, 1 match at a time.
W.A.R. Zone is a computer algorithm that does several things:
- It rapidly learns the skill level of all wrestlers.
- Taking age, weight, and skill into consideration, it pairs wrestlers with their best possible matchup at the event.
- It assigns the pairing to a mat, and sends text message notification to both wrestlers.
- After the match is completed, it updates their skill ratings, and the process can repeat.
- It avoids pairing with recent matchups and teammates.
Why W.A.R. Zone will help wrestling grow:
- Takes less than 2 hours from start to finish.
- Provides wrestlers with as many quality matches as they like
- Eliminates all weight-cutting (there is no need for weight classes, age divisions, or skill divisions)
- Protects new wrestlers from bad matchups; all matches will be competitive (Removing the late-entry barrier)