When I heard the hockey walls were not going to be in place, I thought it was going to make things less congested on the floor, as I'm sure the tourney committee thought as well. But it was worse than I've ever seen it. After the first day, I just kind of made mental notes of people down on the floor that I kept seeing on the floor, but never saw coaching........ I know we can't police this, but having people on the floor, who are not coaching, or wrestling, is making it tough to move around down there. What is strange is that a lot of these people don't realize how good the view is from the seating above. There are no obstructions to your view if you get in the stands.... yet they stand behind the tables, having to move around to peak around people walking in front of them, which in turn crowds the walk way, and gives zero room for on deck wrestlers to do any sort of warm up.

I think I had heard that there has been some talk about putting some mats in exhibition hall, and I think it is time to do it. I don't know how other districts do it, but our district tourney was wrestled on full mats, and we come to state, and most of our kids wrestled (and of course their opponents did also) on half mats. So many out of bounds calls this weekend..... Many matches decided by near takedowns, escapes, etc. on the edge of the mat. Our kids were the beneficiaries of some of these calls, and also on the bad end of some out of bounds calls.

My suggestion is to, for everything except the finals, move the HS and/or 14u division to the exhibition hall on 4 mats, and leave 10 mats in the arena. This would allow everyone to wrestle on a full mat. Some temporary bleacher seating would of course have to be moved in, and we may have to lose the bouncy house....... And for the 1st and 3rd place matches, we still wrestle on 10 mats in the arena for the grand finale. I've been to plenty of events where tourneys are in an exhibition type facility, and if you put seating on 3 sides, and table on one side, it is a really good, close to the action viewing experience. I realize that people will have to move between exhibition hall and the arena to watch matches, but it would sure be less congested in the main arena, both on the floor, and in the stands. No doubt the Expocenter is a great atmosphere, but I think kids should wrestle on full mats at state.

PS: When folks start chiming in on adding 6u state, no problem, we do 6 mats instead of 4 in exhibition hall. By adding 6u state, we would be able to combine the Elementary and Middle school state tourneys to the same day, and most likely get numbers up for those tourneys. Especially middle school state, where I believe numbers were way down. Of course adding 6u state to our tourney puts a burden of the district tourneys adding 6u to their workload......

Mark Stanley or Daniel Reling can probably speak to the amount of space in exhibition hall that might be available (or not available), and also speak to problems that I am not thinking about by having a "two gym" tourney.

Also, on another note, what is the dates for state next year? It is moved up a few weeks, and I know I have the email with the dates somewhere, but posting it here will help some others like me who have spaced it off already.