I was looking at this some and thinking of my son's Aquinas team. In looking at the median breakdown by class I saw that in 6A it was about 1270 pupils per school, 5A it was about 777, 4A about 365, 3-2-1A about 153. My proposal to approach this problem of sub .500 records qualifying for state (if that is indeed determined a problem needing to be fixed) would be to allow all the 5A and 6A teams to bring two wrestlers per weight to regionals. That would make for the possibility of 16 person brackets instead of 8 at Regionals in 5A and 6A. It would be fair to allow schools with 2 or more times the pupils than schools in 4A or 3-2-1A to send twice as many wrestlers per weight to regionals.

I started thinking of this because I believe that the Aquinas team this year which qualified in all 14 classes could have probably qualified at least 20 wrestlers at regionals in this scenario. Thirteen of the 14 that Aquinas did qualify had over .500 records. I believe at least 5 more of the additional 6 that I think Aquinas could have qualified would have had over .500 records if they were given enough varsity opportunities to wrestle. Three of these six additional projected qualifiers from this Aquinas squad have in fact qualified in previous years and I believe all three of them had over .500 records in past years and no doubt would have been over .500 this year as varsity wrestlers. I believe some of these additional wrestlers could have possibly placed at State this year.

I decided to look into the top 10 finishing teams in 5A (Aquinas, Carroll, Hutchinson, Ark City, Emporia, Gardner Edgerton, Valley Center, Lansing, Shawnee Heights, and Liberal). Including Aquinas which had 13 of its 14 with over .500 records, the top ten teams had 90 wrestlers with over .500 records. I believe that at these quality wrestling schools you could get at least a third or 30 more wrestlers to have qualified with winning records under the scenario that each school in 5A and 6A could bring two per weight to Regionals to bring the brackets at regionals to 16 like 4A and 3-2-1A. That is not even taking into consideration the additional over .500 qualifiers that the next ten teams: Great Bend, Salina South, Kapaun, Mill Valley, Topeka-Seaman, Hays, Winfield, Turner, McPherson and Schlagle might potentially add to the mix with over .500 record wrestlers if they were allowed to bring an extra wrestler per weight to Regionals. These additional wrestlers from these schools would probably replace a lot of the qualifiers with under .500 records.

I believe this scenario where you let all the 5A and 6A schools take two per weight group instead of one would mean that you would have 5A and 6A look a lot more like 4A and 3-2-1A in terms of qualifiers with over .500 records. Of course other tournaments during the season would have to either allow these schools to bring more than one wrestler per weight to their tournaments or more tournaments would have to allow these schools to bring their varsity B teams to their tournaments to let these wrestlers develop their varsity experience and records.

I think there are quite of few quality wrestlers at these top 5A and 6A bigger schools who are not even getting an opportunity to wrestle at Regionals.