Wichita Brackets

Before the finals a walked down the wall where the brackets are just to see some of the names of kids who were in the finals.... As I looked I noticed that on nearly all the brackets that nether the #1 nor #2 seed made it to the finals... I dont/havent attended many of the major kids tournaments but I would assume that a tournament of this magnitude would have 1-3 kids that would clearly be seeded above the rest.

An example... the 16U 120 bracket was a 16 man bracket with only about 10 people in it. The top half of the bracket had 4 high school state qualifiers and 2 high school state placers. The bottom half of the bracket had only 1 state qualifier. The kids who placed 3rd at 119 in HS this year was placed in the middle of the bracket and was by far the best person in this bracket...

The questions is should big tournaments do a better job at seeding the good kids especially to separate the #1 and #2?

To give Wichita some credit, entries were due before High School State took place.

I didnt take that into consideration.

Seeding is only as good as the information the entries are submitted. I know our club did not enter number of years wrestled, therefore some of them got a lower seeding. But unless something is obvious, we would move it. Otherwise we left it as it was.

There was a time when the "seeding" of wrestlers for the Wichita Classic took an extremely long ammount of time. This year we had almost 1400 wrestlers.

A few years back we developed a program to build all of the brackets for the Classic.
This program saved a lot of time for the people putting the Classic on.

However we still had a huge headache with seperating the "best" wrestlers as well as seperating wrestlers from the same club.

Two years ago we incorporated a new method for collecting data for determining seeding information.

We asked each club to send us the following information.
No years wrestled
No times folkstyle state champ
No times folkstyle state placer
No time folkstyle state qualifier

Unfortunatley all clubs did not send all of that information. We were able to pick out the obvious ones and place them appropriately but we could not catch all of them.

In terms of the high school entries, we had a number of high school entries that were taken late. If they were taken late, then they were told they would be placed on an open spot on the bracket. We also do not know ahead of time who is going to place at high school state and who will not place.

I calculated the data from the Classic this year and found that 75% of the time a top four placer had a top four seed.

If I would have discounted the brackets that had a number of late entries and also been good information from the clubs, I would venture to say we would have been over 90%.

I hope this helps.

That is interesting. Our club had 4 wrestlers that I know of who were all state placers, one being a state champion. None of them were seeded at Wichita. Three of them placed first. Seeding would have been nice, but all-in-all a great tournament; as always.

Just curious if their records/accomplishments were sent in on the entry form. Were the seeds also state placers and/or champions. I only know that we brought a group of wrestlers from Oklahoma and ALL were seeded fairly at the event. I was a little surprised at how well the brackets I kept track of matched up with the seeds. Quite a few actually ended up with the #1 & #2 seed in the finals. Thanks to all those who put in A LOT of effort and time to make this event a really excellent tournament. We'll be back next year.