Total Sports Development (TSD) continues to expand its horizon within the South Puget Sound sports community as it hosted its first ever “Sasquatch Universal Championships” youth wrestling tournament on Sunday, Jan. 5, at Yelm High School.
When the TSD Toros wrestling club was launched in August 2024, program coach Ben Hawk said he wanted to create different environments for wrestlers at different experience levels. While the TSD Toros will maintain a competitive team, Hawk wanted to create an event for less-experienced wrestlers to compete in a stress-free environment.
“The basis of the community program is to step away from ultra-competitive environments and let the kids learn competition through competition itself. It’s not based on getting trophies, rewards or even recording their wins or losses. It’s more about the experience of getting on the mat in an environment where they’re trying to score points or work for a pinfall,” Hawk told the Nisqually Valley News. “We had a ton of kids and teams show up out there.”
Hawk said clubs and wrestlers from Federal Way, Hoquiam, Vashon Island, Centralia, Rochester, Rainier, La Grande and Spanaway attended and competed in the inaugural Sasquatch Universal Championships youth wrestling tournament. Competitors varied in ages from junior high and below.
At the end of the tournament, Hawk said the most outstanding wrestler received three street tacos from a local taco truck as a small token of appreciation.
“It’s a little reward for showing up, slapping hands and scrapping while finding out how good you really are at wrestling, versus trying to find out who the greatest 8-year-old wrestler in the world is,” Hawk said. “It really doesn’t matter who the best 8-year-old wrestler is at the end of the day. What matters is that they get competition in, and they get to enjoy the realization of what they work on in practice applies to their matches.”
Following the conclusion of the tournament, Hawk said he received a lot of great feedback from parents and competitors on how the competition wasn’t overly intense and actually allowed for the young athletes to learn from their mistakes and apply new techniques.
“They’re all emphatic about coming to our next event. I hope it just blows up and continues to help the grassroots effort of what we’re doing,” Hawk said. “All of these brand-new wrestlers and less-experienced wrestlers get all of this experience. One of our wrestlers got 16 scrimmages, which is essentially half of a high school wrestling season or an entire junior high wrestling season.”
Hawk added that the particular wrestler “potentially saw every specific situation” that he would encounter through a season in that one tournament due to the amount of competition ongoing.
“If you’re not ready to step into the grind where every kid you’re wrestling has been doing this for a few years, has all of the positions memorized, and has their own strategies on how to win a match — it’s frustrating to go out and get beat up,” Hawk said. “Kids stick around and get better, and there’s lots of success with kids getting beat up and eventually becoming the best, but I believe we should teach the kids to walk before we teach them to sprint.”
The TSD Toros competed in the tournament, though Hawk said coaches didn’t keep team scores. What he was thrilled about was the number of matches his athletes competed in.
“I know I had a bunch of kids that got about 10 matches in. That’s what I want. I had a bunch of kids slapping hands and telling me what a great time they had. I had teammates beat teammates who they’d never beat before. It was fun,” Hawk said. “It was a great bonding and learning experience with all of my kids, and they got to become friends with all of their neighboring clubs. I feel like we’ll be able to grow these kinds of events because of the camaraderie that was there.”
