The forty-second annual Floyd Farrand Invitational wrestling tournament is taking place at Lincoln High School in Sioux Falls Thursday and Friday of this week. This is a double elimination individual tournament that features some of the best high school wrestling programs in South Dakota.
This annual event began in 1975 when Floyd Farrand, who was the Lincoln High School athletic director at the time, wanted to create a tournament outside of the state championships, to showcase the talent in the state.
In years past, they’ve had as many as twenty schools in the field, but this year they have 18 teams taking part.
Jim Dorman is a former athletic director for Sioux Falls Lincoln who is one of the tournament organizers. He says the event has a lot of demand.
"We invite the teams back every year that have been here. Some will drop out and then what we do is we pretty much have a waiting list of schools and then we start going down through that waiting list," explains Dorman. "And of course with the number of matches schools can participate in, some schools aren’t able to get in right away; so then we just keep going down the list."
Dorman says they’ve thought about expanding the tournament to accommodate more teams, but that would require a larger venue. He says the tournament staff doesn’t want to take the Floyd Farrand Invitational away from its birthplace at Lincoln High School.