It went fast.

The season of little guy wrestling is over. The older kids finished out their season in Missoula while those in the beginner group headed to Arlee a couple weekends of go to finish their season.

The Arlee Wrestling Club hosted the independent Beginners State Wrestling Tournament on Friday evening, March 25. There were a total of 212 wrestlers participating in the event, which began at 5:00 pm and ended at 9:00 p.m.

Four hours might seem like a short amount of time to get 212 wrestlers through the brackets, but it happened. A total of 401 wrestling matches were run in those four hours, at a rate of 100 matches per hour.

This event was a fund raiser for the Arlee Wrestling Club, which supports the Arlee Wrestling Athletes. Overall, there were some really great matches and a whirlwind of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, coaches and wrestlers.

Approximately 850 people attended the event, along with about 80 workers helped with the tables, officiating, selling t-shirts, runners, brackets and concession workers.

Superior also took some of its wrestlers up to the meet, but none of them ended up placing in the top four. Still, they wrestled their hearts out and have big hopes for next season.

Little guy wrestling kicked off after high school wrestlers finish out at state. This year, the team had a total of 35 kids out for the sport.

“That’s a pretty average number for us. We have a lot more younger kids this year than older ones so we don’t have too many returning,” said Coach Charlie Crabb said.

Crabb said that the season spends a lot of time introducing kids to the sport of wrestling in hopes that if they do decide to wrestle during high school they have an idea of how the sport works.

“We just want to teach them the basics,” Crabb said. “We’re basically sort of doing a lot of prepping. My main goal with the older kids is to get them prepared for high school. With the younger kids, I want to teach them a good stance and some simple moves so they’ll have that foundation.”

Crabb said that little guy wrestling is a lot different from high school wrestling. They don’t really keep results for most of the season until the qualifying tournaments come around during the first weekend of March. Of course, throughout the season, the coaches want the students to also enjoy themselves and have fun.

Several other lessons are also wrapped into the season. The sport promotes hard work and self-discipline. The coaches also hope that the sport teaches the kids to practice good sportsmanship and to learn that even when you lose that it’s an opportunity to learn to fix what went wrong.