Calgary Spartan Wrestling – Changes this year

This year we have identified some areas we are looking to grow and develop as an organization so we wanted to share what these changes look like to our community. Please

1. Girls only practices

We will be adding a Grade 6-12 girls only practice to our schedule. This is in the hopes of providing a more comfortable environment to introduce more girls to our sport and have more size appropriate partners available for our athletes at each practice. We will be offering a discount to these athletes to hopefully entice more girls to come try it out for the season. 

1. Adding locations to North and South

We have decided to add a North and South location to the schedule this year to help accommodate our extra girls only practices as well as a less distracting/quiet space for our Elementary group in the south as the basketball season gets loud at our lady of the rockies. This will also help us in case we get double booked for any of the nights, which is bound to happen once or twice a year. Additionally the addition of the spaces will allow us to get the kids home from practice earlier in the evening which is always a struggle when it comes to our programming. 

1. Starting a Jr/Sr team for experienced athletes only

We will be starting a Jr/Sr program for athletes 18 years and older to help keep more kids in the sport. We realize that the only option in Calgary right now is the U of C varsity program for this age group and they start practice at 4pm in the afternoon with a paid parking lot. This is a major deterrent if you’re not taking classes at the U of C during the daytime. We’re hoping this will create an avenue for athletes in Calgary not in the U of C program to continue wrestling and competing at the highest levels in our sport. This will be a competitive team and experience will be required. 

1. Jamboree Trip to Vancouver for Bantam and CSG

For our Grade 6-12 Athletes we are planning a trip to New Westminster (Vancouver) with a partner club that will host us for the weekend. Instead of traveling across the country for 2-3 matches in a tournament, Our goal is to provide a more cost effective training and development experience for our athletes, while getting to meet some new friends in our neighboring provinces. This will be near the end of November and will cost each athlete between $400-$500 for the weekend. 

This will include flights, hotels, transportation, Dual meet with host club (Friday night), Quad meet style tournament with local clubs (Saturday) and mini camp with host club (Sunday morning) before departure. 

1. Championship Season is moving backwards

Wrestling Canada has pushed back the two National Championships by 6-8 weeks so that creates some unique challenges for our season. In short it will extend our season, making it longer than most other traditional sports you may participate in. From the looks of it (as of writing this email) The normal events will be held during the same weekends in the year, to correlate with the school seasons in Alberta. However, our Provincial Championships will be pushed back to the end of March/Start of April. 

1. No spring session

This year we will not have a spring session due to the two National Championships being pushed back in the spring. We are exploring options to keep our elementary group active during this period and will be planning this winter as to what that will look like!

1. Taking on Sponsors

This year we will be taking on Sponsorship for the first time, our goal with this is to offset the cost of uniforms, equipment and hopefully purchasing new mats that are ours to use for tournaments and camps.  

1. Year end banquet

This year we will be looking to start a tradition of having a year end banquet to wrap up our season. We know the kids (and Parents) work really hard throughout the year and we would like to have a night to get together as a community and celebrate that hard work. We are aiming for either the weekend before or after May Long weekend to host this. 

1. Hosting our own events (Elementary Quad meets, Spartan All Ages)

We would like to host various events this year. Primarily will be our elementary quad meets where we host other clubs from the Calgary area to compete in an informal environment with the opportunity to get 2-4 matches in an evening (depending on size and age appropriate partners available from other clubs). Currently there are only a few events which our elementary athletes can participate in which are all around the same time of the year. We are looking to get this little quad meets going to give them a chance to put into practice what they are learning each night. They of course won’t be mandatory to go to, we also understand that not every athlete that age wants to compete, losing matches is sometimes a deal breaker for having fun in the sport at that age, and we get it. 

We are also looking to host our own all ages tournament near the end of the season as a fundraiser for the club. This will be ideally 2 weeks after the Alberta Open and before the National Championships. More information to follow on these events when were able to start booking facilities in the fall. 

Thanks,

Cody Fairburn