Budget For Wrestling  Shoes:

If you don’t have the cash to spend on wrestling shoes, why waste your time looking at the high end wrestling shoes. First thing you should do as a wrestler or as a parent is to figure out what your budget is. If it’s $50 you can buy a new pair of wrestling shoes, if it’s $20 then you better start looking in the off season to buy a pair of close out shoes. Also, ebay or Craigslist is an option. Particularly if you are in the smaller sizes, usually kids will grow out of their shoes before they wear them out.

Of course if your budget is whatever it needs to be, you can look to spend between $50 and $150 (or more for rare wrestling shoes). Normally I say spend some where around $40 plus maybe $7 to $10 for every year they have been wrestling. So if they are new to wrestling just get them an intro level shoe. As they say get into the 3 to 4 years of wrestling, look to upgrade your shoes to about $75 price point. Once your wrestler has been wrestling for 8 to 10 years, chances are he will know what he likes (and sometimes it’s the cheaper shoes).

Size of Wrestling Shoes

Next you have to figure out what your size is or your wrestler’s shoe size. If you bought a pair of gym shoes or sneakers or running shoes recently, just start with that size. Now don’t worry if you have several different sizes of shoes, just take the most recent one. Chances are your older shoes have been stretched out and likely are not the same size the label says (even though they still fit).

Shopping at WrestlingGear.Com is easy once you determine the correct size. The key step is to try on your most recent shoes and make sure they fit. Make sure the foot is not bulging out of the sides of them. If they are several months old or a hand me down from an older brother or sister, then you are going to have to find out what gym shoe size you would have to buy if you were buying new shoes. Don’t guess, this is a crucial step. The next step is easy, just read the tab called fit guidelines and follow the instructions on how to determine your shoe size.

One upside of shopping at WrestlingGear.Com is they have a sizing guarantee for most shoes. Each shoe is clearly labeled if there is a sizing guarantee available for that shoe. You can return a pair of shoes one time for a sizing issue and WrestlingGear.Com will cover the costs of shipping back and forth.

Another thing to consider with size is how much bigger do you want them? Normally, with kids starting out I recommend getting a shoe no bigger than about a thumbs width in the toe. This way they have some room to grow and a little room for comfort. As kids get more experienced, they will know how they like them to fit. Some customers want their shoes so tight, I find it hard to believe that blood can flow to their feet.

Color

One thing to understand is WrestlingGear.Com carries every wrestling shoe that is in Asics, adidas, Nike, Matman or DoubleSport’s catalog. This means you have the widest selection of shoes anywhere. No one carries all five of those brands.  If your school colors are Red, Royal Blue or Black, you are in luck. Just about every price range has those color combinations. Royal blue and Red are the colors of Olympic wrestling singlets so that is why they are offered in those colors.

Colors like marroon, purple, hunter green, kelly green, columbia blue are hard to find. Every now and then, there will be a color combination that has one of these colors in them. So if you find a pair in these colors, better to buy a few pair of these shoes. At least since 1998, most shoes are in the line for 2 years and then they are gone. Of course, there are some exceptions, but this is a good rule of thumb.

With photos from several different angles and videos of several of the top selling wrestling shoes out there combine all of that with lots of reviews from website visitors – its a great place to do some research and buy your wrestling shoes. One more thing we offer is a sizing guarantee on most wrestling shoes. Don’t like the way the shoes fit, we will send you a different size wrestling shoe at our cost. We will reimburse you all the shipping costs on your sizing exchange.

All right wrestling shoe fans, this is your chance to find out what is going to be coming out for 2011 - 2012 for Asics Wrestling Shoes.

We have the new Aggressor wrestling shoes, the new Cael V4.0 wrestling shoes and the new Split Second 8.0 wrestling shoes.

All of those links in the paragraph above link to product pages where you can check out the shoes in a variety of angles. Most of them show about 8 different photos for you to check out. Reviews are posted along with the technical information about the shoes. You can even order them now, so you will be the first ones to have them when they come out.

We expect them around July 2011, but we will have them the same time our competitions says they will have their shoes. Each year several of our competitors quote an earlier date (to steal sales from their competitors like us that give the date the manufacturers give us). Usually shoes do come in a little earlier than the date we promise. In other words, you won’t get them sooner ordering from somewhere else. In fact, we keep track of sales and almost never oversell a shoe (some of our customers come to us having ordered from a competitor that sold out of the shoe already).

Check out this video about the Aggressor wrestling shoes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7LCM4DHcTQ

There are only two pairs of wrestling shoes available in wide widths. And to be honest they go up to about a 3E foot. We have had customers in the store that can fit a 4E into the shoe, but it was pretty tight. So if you are looking for wide shoes just know that you have a limited selection.

In general, I have a 3E in a dress shoe and my foot can fit into just about any shoe without a zipper lace guard mechanism. So my first recommendation is if your son does not have to buy Wide Gym shoes and or is only a 2E or less, just stay away from shoes with a zipper.

Another issue parents run into is now a days, kids wear their gym shoes wide. With fashion or skateboard shoes as what they are comparing wrestling shoes to, all shoes are going to feel narrow. It’s just the way wrestling shoes are suppossed to fit. Chances are you don’t need wide shoes, you just need to tell your wrestler – this is the way your shoes are suppossed to fit.

A final note on sizing of gym shoes. For kids that are young just starting out, I try to size them perfectly. Maybe a thumbs width or less in the toe. This is for say kids maybe four years old to about 7 or 8 years old. You don’t want to get shoes too big for these little wrestlers. They will be tripping and falling over them if they are too big. For kids maybe 9 to 14 or 15, we say if you want to try to get a little more time out of them (e.g. a whole season), buy a thumbs width or a little larger in the toe. Usually, these kids are grownig pretty quickly and can tolertate a little bigger shoe. For kids that are say 15 to 18, just size them like we recommend. Try to get a thumbs width or less in the toe.

Every wrestling shoe we have has sizing recommendations on them. Follow the link above at the start of this blog post to start shopping. Post any questions or comments under our blog here.

Our next post will discuss, Nike,adidas, and Asics wrestling shoes and tell you which models are cut a little wider…

Jeff Pape
Owner

We expect many vendors to try and reduce costs this year and when I say that I expect inventory to be very tight this year. Gone are the days of ordering a lot more shoes than the stores like us order and hope to sell them. Look for many of these shoes prices to increase as they are less readily available.

Here are our top 7 hot wrestling shoes for 2010 – 2011 wrestling season:

1) Nike Inflict Wrestling Shoes – Red Black – this shoe was not made last year. It was in the past and we could have sold a bunch of them in 2009-2010 season. Here is your chance to get them now.

2) Nike Inflict Wrestling Shoes – Grey Black – this shoe was made last year, but there were not enough made last year to satisfy demand. Remember trying to find this shoe last year? If you did, you likely did not find it.

3) Nike Inflict Wrestling Shoes Blue Black – same as #2 on this list, it was made last year but not enough. This is listed as number three even though it could have easily been #1 or #2. It’s listed as #3 because it’s not the most neutral team color. It will be highly sought after though.

4) Asics Aggressor Wrestling Shoes Royal Blue and Grey – great team color combination (and neutral too). This will be the surprise of the year I have a feeling. Although since we designated it as our #4 hottest shoe can it still be labelled a surprise? This is an updated version of the Rulon wrestling shoe and will likely challenge for one of the hottest wrestling shoes of the season.

5) Asics Aggressor Wrestling Shoes Red and Black and Asics Aggressor Wrestling Shoes Royal Blue and Gold – was not sure where to put these two shoes as far as #5 or #6 so I put them as #5 (also it let’s us slip in an extra pair of wrestling shoes into our top 7 wrestling shoes picks of the season.  The Aggressors are an up date to the Rulon wrestling shoe and will feature a more comfortable toe area. Don’t know what to call the toe area on this shoe, but my cross training shoes have this feature and they are much more comfortable due to this new technology.

6) Combat Speed III Wrestling Shoes – can’t go wrong with this shoe. At around $60 retail for this shoe, it is going to be a favorite work out shoe at the minimum for the Elite wrestler not looking to beat up his $125 pair of wrestling shoes day in and day out in practice. However, I think many people are going to fall in love with this shoe again. Remember if you like this shoe or any shoe we sell, they generally only last for a few years and then are gone. Combat Speed II wrestling shoes typically sell in excess of $150 to $250 even in used condition. At $60 these shoes are going to be a steal. It looks like these shoes are going to be readily available at your local sporting goods store so sometimes that will effect a shoes desireability if anyone can get it.

7) Asics Wide Split Second 6 Wrestling Shoes – what a shoe that is over 3 years old is going to be on the hot 7 for 2010-2011 wrestling season. We’ll almost no one carries this shoe so it sells well for us. We are committed to offering you the wrestling shoes you want for the season. We will only bring in a few hundred of these pairs of shoes, but they will likely sell out within a few weeks of us having them delivered. If you happen to be lucky enough to get these shoes while we have them, consider yourself lucky. They won’t last and even waiting a day can cause you not to get them. And at $70 retail price, most parents won’t have a problem getting these shoes for kids with a EEE width.

Many of the top wrestling shoes photos are on our flickr site. Check out wrestling shoe photos here.

The Combat Speed III’s shoes are on the way to the warehouse, there was a mix up with adidas not knowing that we want the adult shoes as soon as possible. So if you pre-ordered your wrestling shoes from WrestlingGear.Com they will be on their way next week.

Can’t wait to get the Asics Aggressor wrestling shoes in our store. That is our last shoe that we are going to carry for 2010-2011 season that we don’t have in already. Look for this to be a hot seller and if the Rulon’s are any indication of how hard they will be to find this year, better get those orders in sooner than later.

I suspect once again Nike, adidas, Asics will all be holding inventory pretty tight for wrestling shoes (there most expensive products usually). Gone are the days where they can bring in a ton of shoes and hope they sell. To be fair, we are the same way. We are ordering what we think we can sell and running through what inventory we have. We simply can’t be stuck with a ton of wrestling shoes at the end of the season.

If you are done growing or don’t anticipate growing too much between say September and December, best to get those wrestling shoes early in September or October.

Check out the Asics Dan Gable Ultimate 2 Wrestling Shoes in Blue Black and Silver

Just to give you the heads up about Asics Wrestling shoes – they all do have a lace guard mechanism that meets the rules set for wrestling in the USA.

We recently noticed many of the Asics wrestling shoes in our photos don’t have the lace guard mechanism shown properly. Here is an example of the Dan Gable Ultimate II wrestling shoes. We will be updating all our photos this year to make sure we shoe you with the shoes lace guard mechanism engaged properly.