The Essential Steps To Starting a Wrestling Club without prior experience

The Essential Steps To Starting a Wrestling Club without prior experience
anthonyflatt.com
The first thing I want to ask is, Is there a need for a wrestling club in your area? I know that as a chairman of USA Wrestling and Team Georgia, I get calls all the time from people wanting to know where a wrestling club is in their area; is there another one other than the one they're currently going to? Oftentimes it's a disgruntled parent, a disgruntled coach that is unhappy with the situation at the school or the club or the program they're in, and they're looking for another program or looking to start their own program.
I would seriously tell you to look at all of your options there. See if there's a way to continue working with the program you've been a part of. If there are some challenges or issues, can those be worked out? The concern that I would have is, if you have an existing wrestling program in an area and somebody breaks off from that program because they're disgruntled, now are we going to have two smaller programs and less successful?
Also, since most of these programs are centered around a high school and oftentimes they're hosted at a high school in conjunction with a high-school coach, are you not breaking off from that high school coach, and is that going to cause some issues there?
Again, are you starting a club for the right reasons? Is there a need? Certainly if there is no club in your area and you see that need, if you've checked with the high-school coach and the middle-school coach and there's no issue, there are no programs in that area, then we definitely want to get another program started.
That's the way wrestling grows-the more clubs we have, the more wrestlers we have. The more wrestlers we have, the more events we have. The more events we have, the more clubs we have, the more wrestlers we have, and that's the circle of life for this sport. So we want to make sure that as you're looking at starting a program, have you done a little research? Have you gone and talked to the local high school and middle school-if you've got several in your area, go talk to all of them.
Also, go talk to the rec program. We do have several areas that have both a wrestling club being run out of the high school, and another wrestling club being run out of the local rec department, and that's fine. Actually, that's really good, especially if your school district's requirements are that you have to live in the city limits, or you have to live within a certain proximity to the school to be able to attend there.
Oftentimes the kids that live just outside of those boundaries get left out because they can't attend your program because the club is set up to support that school, and since you're not going to be going to that school, they don't want you attending their club. So having another club as an option is a very good thing, but make sure you're doing it for the right reasons because it's going to take a lot of work, effort and volunteer hours.
If you're just a disgruntled dad or coach, you may not have the desire to put in those hours to make that club successful. When you're looking at your club, you've got to think about, What are the ages that you're looking at working with? This is going to be mainly focused on elementary school, middle school and high school.
Also, there are such things as clubs at the college level, and I'll just talk briefly about those. Those are usually clubs that are sponsored by the college or university. A lot of the students become wrestlers or they were wrestlers in high school and they continue to wrestle in college. It's a program that the college or university offers as a club or intramural sport. Those are good things.
We're not going to talk a lot about that, mainly because my experience is with elementary, middle and high school, but I will tell you that those college programs do need a lot of support because they don't traditionally do fundraising the way we are used to it, running tournaments and having youth wrestlers in a youth club.
Although, that's a great idea for college programs, to have a youth club at their college or university and help those kids. You get great college wrestling experience and help the wrestling kids in that area. But most of them don't have a youth program and they're looking for funding from donations and help from the state associations. Some of them are completely funded by the university, but most of them need funds so those wrestlers can travel and compete outside of just the practice room.