1234....Contrary to popular belief, wrestling has taken a back seat to basketball for years. Most nights scheduled for wrestling meets are on Tues. Wed. Thur., and can never be in the gym before 5:15. This means the wrestlers have to wait for B-ball practice to finish, leaving only 15 min. to get set-up before a dual meet. Not that we would want to inconvenience any team, but even our biggest meets of the year never draw the "Friday Night Crowd" because we always wrestle on "off" nights. Even so, if you think about a team losing a room of their own, it would be like telling one of the Varsity and J.V. B-ball teams that they could no longer practice in one of the gymnasiums and would have to practice on the tennis courts. Each night they would have to roll out a portable hoop (because the size of their court would be reduced by half), set up equipment, sweep the courts, and reverse the whole process when finished. This would not be a good situation for anybody.

I guess I did not explain exactly what I meant. I meant why is it not ok for wrestling to be brought equal with the other sports. Again this may be a philsophical thing, but an example could be basketball. Basketball has 8 teams, boys and girls combined. All 8 of those teams cannot practice at the same time. Even with the new gym space, there will be basketball teams coming back to practice. When does wrestling ever have to come back late. When wrestling meets occur basketball teams have to come early or not practice at all. NVGriff I know exactly where you are coming from and agree and respect you. This is not a "wrestling" thing to me but an overall 3 sports season and a PE program. In other words you could replace wrestling with any other sport and i would have some of the same concerns. Enough rambling.

1234...The Parker wrestlers HAD their own wrestling room. So it would be going backwards...would it not? And there are coaches offices with showers...such as Parker boys PE office.

I also would like to add that if I were fully vested in the wrestling program I very well may have a different view on what happened.

Dusty, I don't know of any coaches who have showers in their offices. There other things in the referendum plans that were changed since the vote. I am a big supporter of athletics as well as education and firmly believe that they do go together. The only part of this I don't agree with is why don't other sports have their own "place to call home" How is it going backwards for our wrestlers by not having their own "place" when many other sports do not.

Once again our administrators mishandled a school related decision. How much longer is our district administrators going to get a free pass?

I think the main point here is that they took the wrestling room out of the plans AFTER the referendem was voted on and passed.
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That's BAIT AND SWITCH.
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Now they corrected that error.
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If other needs showed up after the fact, deal with that but not at the expense of another program.
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Hey, after it's all done, the district will find money for whatever "extras" they want anyway. They always do. Remember the pool at Marshall, as well as other projects at Kennedy?

again, not discounting wrestling or athletics in general. as several have stated, i learned many life lessons and made lifelong friends through athletic programs, and as a person with a vested interest in both physical education and athletics, i am not fighting against athletics, only to have it recognized that athletics are taking priority over a specific school program that will be negatively impacted, specifically the locker room area, if consideration is not given to their needs as well. comparatively, any student/parent/teacher/coach/advisor with a vested interest in any program, whether it be chess club to deca to ap chemistry, would not want that program compromised.

In reading the comments there are still many people that don't understand what the parents of the wrestlers and wrestlers were asking for. To sum this up, in the referendum a wrestling room just like the padded practice room that we have was in the plans and after we as voters voted on the referendum it was taken out. What was suggested was to have mats hanging from the ceiling in the new gym area that wrestling was to share with gymnastics. Each night before practice the wrestlers would have to lower the hoist with the mats on, unroll the mats, tape the mats, clean the mats, practice, then untape the mats, roll the mats and put them back on the hoist to be raised above the gym. How safe and practical is that solution? Wrestlers would not be able to stay after practice and practice or practice off season, not to mention how would they practice when gymnastics had a meet? The school system was ready to spend at least $20,000.00 on 1 hoist and would 1 hoist have been enough? The parents of the wrestlers didn't ask for this expense, just status quo - the lower level padded wrestling room. I've heard and read that the area where the wrestling practice room is where they wanted to put in lockers and showers. Single stall showers - 16 to be exact. There are 30 people in a gym class and I challenge the school to survey the kids and find out how many students actually shower at school. How many of your children can shower in 5 minutes at home? That's the amount of time they have to shower after gym class - 5 minutes to shower and 5 minutes to change their clothes. And how about the 2500 square feet that the coaches need for a coaches room with showers? Each coach now has their own shower in their offices. I thank the school board for listening to us parents and wrestlers and having the forsight to look at the future. Athletes know and understand that they are students first and are held accountable for their grades. They learn discipline and priorities to juggle school, athletics, relationships, jobs and just plain life. To discount athletes and in this case wrestlers and their passion to fight for a program that has allowed anyone that goes out for wrestling to participate just doesn't get it and unfortunately never will and that's pretty sad.

As viligandy said, for many students, athletics are not merely a bonus, but a force that motivates them to become students. In my 35 years of teaching high school, I can number in the hundreds and hundreds the number of students whose high school diplomas were as much a measurement of their athletic involvement as anything else. Athletics were not secondary, but primary, in their ultimate achievement. In order to participate in the sport(s) they loved, they HAD to demonstrate academic success. It WAS the force that powered them to graduation. And I am sure we all are aware of the statistics relative to the future lives of high school graduates and non-graduates.

Vigilandy & NVgrf:
I do agree that athletics teaches student many things, and as somebody who has been diligently involved in sports since age 14, I do not question the importance of them. I just want to remind the public that the school is a school, and that athletics are a bonus for those students who choose to participate.

Vigilandy...........You hit the nail on the head!! Well said!! I realize that it must be difficult for folks who have never been involved in athletics to understand all of this though. I really do feel sorry for them for what they have missed in their lives.

Some say, “Why spend money on athletics? Or on providing space for a wrestling room?" It’s not quite that simple. Education and this referendum is about providing additional space for students to learn, and athletics teaches students much more than how to wrestle, or how to shoot a basketball. What is more important? To some students the playing field is their home away from home. It is their place to learn and grow as people. Shouldn’t that be what education is about as well? It may not be arithmetic or science, but to a lot of students sports are their REASON to WANT to learn. The sport and the coaches help students pass classes, and in the process, help them graduate. It helps them become better people by teaching them how to work hard, set goals, make friends, solve personal problems, deal with stress, win and lose with dignity and class, get back up when their down, and most of all, TO DREAM!!! If the School District of Janesville offers any courses like that, hell, I’ll sign my kid up right now and say, "scrap sports!" So if you think that wrestling, or athletics in general are irrelevant to education, maybe you should think about the thousands of kids who benefit from being in athletics every year! Think about how athletics compliments the education of our children and teaches them life skills that mom and dad don't have time to teach them at home.

Lets just remember that these kids are STUDENTS first and athletes second. They need an appropriate space to practice and compete, as does every team, but not at the expense of district and state mandated graduation requirements such as Physical Education, which is slated to lose 300 lockers and locker room square footage to the renovation, whereas athletics are gaining the square footage and more lockers. Seems a little backward to me.

You know...It amazes me how people aquire "key board courage" and would never have the guts to stand up and slam everyone in person!Janesvillecomments: You seriously must have wanted to annoy as many people as you could with that comment. No one would be that ignorant on purpose! If you are ignorant, try educating yourself with the original plan for the wrestling area. Then, after you realize that the original plan was a total accident waiting to happen, Please let us know what you think. As far as you insulting the education that the Parker wrestlers have, or any athlete for that part, that was a sucker punch. You made yourself sound like a little insecure kid who just was made fun of by one of the jocks. Grow up and leave the kids out of it.

Because my family has ties to the Parker Wrestling program, I am extremely glad to see that the school board has made the decision to include a wrestling room in the now renovation plans. I am also glad to see that they changed their decision because a referendum is supposed to represent what "the people" want, and considering that this new wrestling room was part of the referendum that we all voted for (or against) in 2006, it was wise for them to change their decision to include what "the people" voted on, not to some new plan that was not part of the original referendum. If they were going to make such drastic changes, it should have been re-presented to voters. Also, I have heard that the vote was so close in the results of the referendum issue that if just the parents of current wrestlers were taken out of the "YES" category and put into the "NO" category, the referendum would not have gone through. As a person who voted YES to the referendum in 2006, you can bet that if the referendum was presented to me the way that the district has changed it, I surely would have voted NO. Why is it fair, or even right, to take away a practice area from a very successful athletic program and give that room to larger locker rooms, athletic offices, and more showers. (As a graduate from Parker, I only remember ever using the showers after swim, so why the need for larger/more showers? And the locker rooms really weren't that crowded during gym.) The alternatives that were given to the wrestling program was to practice in PART of the new gymnasium and to suspend their mats from the ceiling. To me this sounds just as unsafe as if you were to send them out to the parking lot. It is necessary for the wrestlers to has proper padding, including that on the walls as is in the current wrestling room. Also, there are certain coaches at Parker who only hold closed practices, where only the team and coaches are allowed in the gym. What effect will this have on a team such as wrestling? Will they then have to hold late night or early morning practices to work around those certain coaches?

Recently, some of the parents of Parker Wrestlers began a petition to get the original decision of not including the wrestling room in the plans, many of which received a great deal of support from those in the community who were willing to sign the petition. Whether or not these were presented at the meeting last night I do not know, but it just goes to show the importance of this WONDERFUL athletic program to the community and the dedication of the athletes and their families to work hard to get what this program fully deserves!

To Janesvillecomments:
Parker's Wrestling MVP last year is at the top of his class and has already been accepted into UW-Madison's Pre-Med program. What did you say you do for a living? Maybe you should have been a Parker Wrestler.

With your forked tongue, "janesville comments", you shouldn't have any problem shoveling in those fries you so sarcastically speak of.
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Did the school board "cave in" or did they listen to the constituents who bothered to express their concerns?
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Where are you in this equation?
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Are you content to sit at your keyboard and throw out digs at Parker grads, of which you are probably one, or are you one of the "tip-top" ones who really knows how to effect change? By your post(s), I'd guess the former.
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Civics 101. It would be worth your while to stay awake for it next time around.

janesvillecomments........My son was captain of an undefeated Big 8 champion Parker wrestling team and finished in the top five individuals at the State Tournament twice. He is 35 years old and is president of his own engineering firm. Many of values and much of the drive to excell in all he attempts in life came from Coach Cramer and the Parker wrestling program! So maybe it is you who should supersize your horizons before making ignorant statements.

Kudos to the school board for having priorities and not caving in to the jocks again. How much of the $71 Million for a new gym and it's not good enough for the wrestlers? Nice to know that yet another generation of Parker grads will be in tip-top shape from wrestling class as they enter the labor force and ask that all-important question at their new job: "You want fries with that?"

WOW!!! This is Great News for everybody!!! It just goes to show that a small group of concerned people can make a huge difference!!! Thanks to all the people, especially the parents and wrestlers that worked countless hours to insure the future of a great tradition that wrestling has been at Parker High School! For all concerned, this change will not cost $XXX million dollars just to keep a piece of our old room. Thanks Again!!