We are planning to host our 2021 tournament early this year, Dec. 13 will be our date here in Hill City. We will again be doing the selective team scoring and awarding champion and runner up plaques. Tournament is on a Sunday, starting at 10am to allow some extra travel time, or you could come out Saturday and bird hunt then wrestle on Sunday. Strict limit of 250 wrestlers, and to maintain 50% occupancy we will only allow 1 spectator to enter per registered wrestler. Mask will be required for everybody unless currently wrestling a match. Those are the conditions given to us from the school district, and we will follow them to allow our kids to get on the mat. Hope to see you in December.

Todd,

Can coaches get in that don't have children wrestling?

Yes. There are two ways to get in.

1. Have a current USA coaches card.
or
2. Be the 1 spectator of a registered wrestler.

Thank you

FYI - I have closed the registration for a couple weeks until we get a little closer to the date. In the event we have to cancel I don’t want to deal with 250 refunds. As of today, I visited with the school admin and we are still good to go as long as we follow the guidelines set forth in our flyer. Like most of the state, we had a rash of new cases in the county this week, so I want to lay low for a couple weeks and hope we can all get it under control. I will plan to open registration back up Thanksgiving weekend if we are still on. Those of you already registered, you are still in there, no worries.

I'm getting a lot of request to register lately and wanted to make a post here to help eliminate some of those. Here is where we currently are.

At this time we are waiting to see what the KSHSAA Board of Directors vote will be Tuesday afternoon before opening up registration. If they choose to postpone school activities until January we won’t be able to use the school gym for our tournament. If we are indeed allowed to move forward with the tournament I will open registration later this week.

That’s all I can tell you at this point. Keep an eye on the USA Kansas wrestling talk page and I will post on there either way, cancel, or open registration.

Todd Ashbaugh
HCWC President

After the KSHSAA attendance policy was announced Tuesday, we adjusted things a little here. The above posts are no longer valid, please see the updated flyer on Trackwrestling. This was posted to social media this morning. AGAIN, THE ABOVE POST REFERENCING 1 FAN AND COACHING CARDS GETTING IN IS NO LONGER VALID.

We are moving forward with hosting our tournament on Dec. 13. The attendance policy has changed a bit so please look at it and understand before registering any kids. We will strictly follow this to make sure we run off a safe and smooth tournament for our young people. Registration will open around 9am this morning, and it will close at 225 kids. The updated attendance policy can be found on our flyer on Trackwrestling.

For those looking just for the attendance policy, we are only allowing 1 coach per 2 wrestlers. That's it. No other spectators. Please don't drive all the way out here and expect to get in if you are not the 1 coach with 2 wrestlers at your side when you enter. I do not like it either, but it's the only way we can get our kids on the mat currently.

We have reached our max number of wrestlers for next weekend and registration is now closed. Thank you to everyone who registered early. Let’s have a great day back on the mat next weekend in Hill City.

Todd,

I would love to hear how your tournament went. Things that worked and didn't work. We are headed to Hoxie for our first tournament of the year. We are excited to give it a go.

Hoping to see more tournaments pop up in the near future.

Good things:
1. Coaches and participants complied with the mask mandate for the most part. I was happy with this. We all need to do our parts with this if we are going to continue to be able to have tournaments.
2. I split our mats down the middle of the gym lengthwise to place the tables with my high school team running the tables. This kept all people away from the tables and isolated them from the majority of people all day. Coaches stayed opposite the tables on the edges of the mats. I really like this format to eliminate the congestion around the tables. Just the kids checking in came near the high school kids working the event.
3. We livestreamed all 6 mats. We had an upload issue to begin as there was not enough bandwidth on our staff network to stream that many at once. We changed 3 of them to cellular data after a few matches and it relieved the stress on the network and all 6 seemed to be good the rest of the day. We use ethernet cables to all the table computers so we don't have to worry about wifi issues for the track computers.
4. Our attendance policy was only 1 coach per 2 wrestlers. That wasn't ideal, but it was the only way we could get 225 wrestlers in the gym and stay under our 400 total person capacity.

Would change if we had to do it over:
1. We waited until 930ish to build the brackets due to the unknown number of possible scratches, especially this year. Ideally I would build those the night before and go through and make sure the seeding looked right and that teammates were separated. There is a function when setting up your tournament to do this, but only for 1st rounds. Had some teammates wrestle in the semi finals which is unfortunate.