Traditional youth tournaments are grades K-8th, folk-style, and take place December through March. Youth tournaments are held at area schools throughout the state.  You may enter any of them. Most brackets are made with only age and weight, not with experience.  Your child may compete against kids with more experience. Tournament entry fees are usually $25-50. Most tournaments are a 4-man round robin, so each wrestler has 3 matches consisting of 3 one-minute periods.  Medals, ribbons, and trophies are distributed at the end of the tournaments. Many tournaments are on an honor system regarding weights.  

The number of tournaments that you enter is entirely up to you. A useful rule of thumb is for your athlete to compete in roughly as many tournaments as your athlete's grade in school (1 tournament in 1st grade, 2 in second grade, 3 in third grade, etc.) Feel free to ask coaches about which tournaments are a good match for your child.  Also, let us know which tournaments your child has entered.  We would love to help coach them (if it works with our schedules).

If you are competing in a tournament, you must have wrestling shoes, fingernails cut short (to prevent scratches), and a headgear. Singlets are often optional, but if you are wrestling regularly, it is nice to have  When at the tournament, the wrestler must check in with the scoring table. Each wrestler will wear either a red or green leg band.  Scoring will match the leg band. Each wrestler will start facing each other in the neutral position. The next two periods, the wrestler’s starting position (neutral, top, or bottom) depends on a coin toss.