Coach Johnson brought up a point that needs to be considered in this conversation and that is the number of competitions.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Norton Wrestling Tournament. We are reproducing the wrestling page from the 1965 Norton Yearbook to use as our program cover. On this page is the 1965 Norton season schedule, which I am sure was very typical for that time and which is also probably the "golden age" of cutting weight.

The 1965 season consisted of 7 duals, one each with the individual League Schools and two single day invitational tournaments, that is it. A regular season consisted of around 15 matches. Most of our kids now have that many matches by Christmas!

Basically, in those days there was one weigh-in per week with only 2 back-to-back Friday/Saturday weigh-ins. Also, at that time the state qualifying tournament series took two weeks: a one-day district tournament followed by a one-day regional tournament rather than a two-day regional. At that time the only two-day tournament on the schedule was State.

Changing from days/kinds of competition to competition points has led to our kids "toeing" the line on a much more regular basis. This has led to a big increase in the number of weigh-ins during the week and back-to-back weigh-ins. For example, we have a team that comes to our tournament that has a dual on the Thursday and the Friday prior to coming to Norton on Saturday. That is 1/3 of the weigh-ins, in one week, that a 1965 wrestler would have had to have met in the entire regular season.