There are many sports activities that capture the interest of student athletes but may not have widespread or popular support. When it comes to booster clubs you normally associate them with marching band or more popular athletics such as football, basketball, baseball etc. While these more widely popular sports benefit from booster club support, there is no reason that less popular athletic activities can’t enjoy booster club support as well. Case in point – creating a wrestling booster club! Whether it’s middle school or high school wrestling, we’ll examine how a booster club crucially benefits your school wrestling program.
What Is A Wrestling Booster Club?
This article is not a guide for how to start a booster club, but rather we are examining what a wrestling booster club is and how it helps a school wrestling program grow. Like any other booster club, your organization is essentially a micro business that is created to help your wrestling team through event planning and support, program funding, communication, activity promotion and moral support. Your booster club is the engine that takes over most, if not all of the business side of running your wrestling team. This allows the school to support how it can and the wrestling coaches to coach. Working hand in hand with your school, district and coaches the booster club ensures that things like gyms are rented, equipment is up to date, training is funded, uniforms are available for all athletes and on and on are taken care of. These logistical and support systems for the wrestling team not only make a booster club important, but essential to the team’s success.
Ways A Wrestling Booster Club Makes An Impact
Middle school and high school wrestling sees a lot of fierce competition and passionate support. This comes not only among it’s student athletes, but also the parents, students, coaches, and everyone playing a part. Your booster club helps keep things organized and that passion focused on whats best for the wrestling team in the long and short term. Wrestling matches are just one element of what a team engages in. Leading up to them takes a lot of planning, practice, team building, fundraising, and promotion. Booster club support help with all of those aspects as well moral support for high school or middle school wrestler that may feel the stress from their balancing their studies with their dedication to their sport. Your booster club is essentially the glue holding a successful wrestling program together.
Physical, Mental and Skill Improvement
Like other athletic booster clubs, your wrestling booster club will step in to support not only the athletics but also help ensure student participants are maintaining their scholastic achievement. Working with coaches, the school and district the booster club will co-support scholastic achievement required for a student to participate as a wrestler. In some cases booster club volunteers personally step up to help students overcome learning hurdles, or in other cases help the school develop programs to support athletic scholastic achievement. At the same time, the booster club is there to help coaches improve the physicality and skills of the athletes to in turn win more matches. This support can range from raising funds for new equipment, special training camps or just helping by increasing the time athletes have to access equipment. All in all your booster club really exists to serve the wrestling team in the best possible way to help it excel.
Team Building
Wrestling can be cutthroat, even at a young age. Whether you’re on a team or not, being competitive among peers is often the norm. A booster club can help to refocus teammates from competing with each other, to helping each other advance in order to better compete with other teams. Again, working with coaches, your booster club can help students learn that there really isn’t an “I” in “team” and give student wrestlers a chance at learning to work together, grow together and become a winning team due to collective individual achievement!
Socialization Via Your Wrestling Booster Club
The top level financial and supportive benefits booster clubs add to both middle schools and high schools are pretty clear. From team building to bringing awareness to the sport and school athletics – the list is long. Another added benefit usually not discussed, is the socialization aspect to being a part of the booster club. Booster clubs allow supporters/volunteers, student wrestlers and coaches a way to mingle, get to know each other, and socialize beyond practice or school hours. Your booster club allows all of parties interested in wrestling and the school wrestling program to interact, grow and share ideas on the future of the sport. This socialization is not only fun, but allows for strategy creation and execution as well building bigger bonds with between the school and community.
A Booster Club Increases Interest in Wrestling
In many cases Wrestling as a school sport may not be that popular which means it receives less attention. This translates to less student interest, less community interest and overall less funding. Starting a wrestling booster club is the first step to help your school wrestling program grow in all aspects. Your booster club is the group that will help your team get the equipment it needs, has the practice facilities available, the moral support to maintain student interest and eligibility and increase overall awareness of the team within the school and local community. In many cases your booster club will handle fundraising through selling item, concessions, donations and events. Not only do all of these activities help raise money for the team, the regular holding of events also raises the visibility of the team throughout your community. Likewise by starting social media profiles, engaging with local media and the community to promote the accolades of the wrestling team you are also helping raise the team’s visibility. The impact of increased promotion of events around the wrestling team as well as matches and successes eventually also leads to more student interest and participation. Altogether you can see that even the most basic booster club support can help any wrestling program grow to be a popular top tier athletic activity.
Even Wrestling Equipment Needs Updating
Finally, one of the more obvious ways a booster club positively impacts a wrestling team is helping to maintain high quality equipment. Wrestling surprisingly requires a good deal of equipment needed for the success of the team including: uniforms and warm ups, personal headgear, mats, weights, books, timers and more. A lot of school systems will forego updating or even investing in key equipment as long as they can. Creating a booster club will help bridge those funding gaps through its various fundraisers ensuring the wrestling team has what it needs to be competitive and in turn improving team morale.
As you can see if your school has a wrestling team, but no wrestling booster club supporting them they are at a serious disadvantage to those teams that have the support of a booster club. Whether your team needs equipment, moral support, community awareness or more participants, creating a booster club could be the answer to all of the above. Learn how to start a booster club in your state today!
