So You Want to Run A Wrestling Tournament
So You Want To Run A Wrestling Tournament? - by Jeff Pape
So you want to run a wrestling a wrestling tournament? For the next couple months, I will discuss various aspects of running a successful tournament. You may ask what a successful tournament is, and that is one of the first things I will talk about. How do you define a successful tournament?
I believe it is just like anything else in life, it is a lesson I learned from my high school teachers. One in particular was my Freshmen English teacher who spoke at the beginning of the school year about the power of setting goals. The second was my wrestling coach, Charlie Farina, one of the winningest high school wrestling coaches in the nation. He never had us write down our goals on paper, but he was always asking us what we wanted to do after high school or accomplish at the end of the year. So getting back to how this relates to running a tournament, figure out what your goal or goals are.
Is your goal to make money? Is it to offer wrestlers an opportunity to wrestle on an open week end in your states wrestling calendar? Is it a last minute tournament you are putting together on a whim and a prayer? Is your goal to develop a prestigious state or national tournament? Depending on your goals, you will need to do different activities to meet your goals.
I will write about two of my goals, one was to make money and two was to offer a nice environment for both the wrestling fan and the wrestler. I wanted teams and parents to come back to my tournament year in and year out. One of the keys in developing this long term view was that I did not have a huge tournament the first year. I used the first year to get the kinks out of my system. We did have some kinks that first year, but we still managed to get out by 2:00 p.m. We had about 350 kids that first year, and after that we averaged about 500 kids with our max of 673 kids out the door at 4:30. The year we had 673 kids everyone hit their number of wrestlers, normally this does not happen. I will write more about this in next month's column on marketing.
A few things our club did to make money for the long term was to decide on the awards we would use for all future tournaments. This allows you to roll over awards to the following year and you do not have old medals lying around from previous years. We gave away a t-shirt to the champion after our second year, nothing like advertising for your next tournament. Most who attended had a good experience, so it was well worth the cost (plus the kids loved them). It was just another way we tried to distinguish ourselves from any other tournament. We shopped at food stores that allowed us to return unopened food like boxes of candy bars, nachos, drinks or similar items. This allowed us to keep our concessions open through out the entire day. We always doubled our cost on the item, we did not do this our first year, but learned a very valuable lesson for the years to come. You need to build in a profit margin in your concessions. A final note, we generally manned the gates to charge people through the end of the day. Most people understood we were doing it as a fund raiser, so they did not have a problem with it.
The second goal of making it a nice environment was the planning of what side of the bleachers would be open, arranging the mats and scorer's tables for optimal viewing, creating seats to eat lunch at, having enough food throughout the day, and basic things that you can come up with that you like when you spend all day at a tournament. I am sure you and your parents can come up with a list of things you liked and disliked about a tournament. Another thing we did that most clubs do not, is we asked for a coach from every team to come in and help bracket. This helps you in two ways, one if you have to ask the coach a question about the wrestler's skill level, he/she is right there and if there are any questions about why this kid was put here or there, I was able to say, "A coach from your team was invited into the bracketing room for this very reason." Not too mention, I always needed the help writing up brackets and the coaches had a vested interest in getting the tournament to start and was properly bracketed.
Next month, look for ideas on how to market your tournament. In December we will talk about operating your tournament and in January we will have our top twenty list.
