Our town is big into wrestling. My son loved high school wrestling. My neighbour put her two youngest in the club. It resolved the issue of the bigger kid hurting the younger in their constant rough play. The coaching was focused on respect for your opponent. The older learned how to 'win' without hurting and the younger learned how to defend. Both got a lot of the need to rough house out of their system at wrestling.
Wrestling is another one where the coaching needs to be
heavily scrutinized. Since the sport is organized by weight classes, there's a ton of pressure to develop disordered eating. I LOVED wrestling freshman and sophomore year of high school, but the coach that took over in my Junior year was a world-class prick. We had a guy that was wrestling at 119 that was 140-145 two days before each match. He'd cut 20-25 fucking pounds EVERY WEEK. It made him go from also-ran to a state champ (since he was wrestling kids that were effectively ~20 pounds smaller) but at what cost? Oh and he started the season at 175 because that was his "football weight".
With that said, it did develop a lot of confidence and I was in incredible shape when I wrestled. And there are asshole coaches in every sport. But still, there's some shitty culture that can really develop in the wrestling community.
I'm a little curious though, why the need to look into non-traditional sports? For a 9-11 year old, it seems like the main goals are exercise, socialization, and learning to function as a team and it does it REALLY matter what sport they're playing when they're learning those things? I played soccer for a long time (ages 5-14) and nobody would ever give me a scholarship for it but it was fun and I got to hang out with my friends outside of school. I'm not really sure any other sports would've been better from that aspect.
