Team Roper,

We had none of the problems you are describing at in D1N. We managed 59 scratches, wrestled 487 competitors, and completed the tourney/paperwork by 3:30pm. Any tournament I run in the future will utilize trackwrestling...with or without a future "state mandate". Running a tournament is complex and a qualifier even more so. I am sure the group of "volunteers" at your site did the very best job possible, however each District director was made aware of this mandate before the sites were chosen this year and they all had an opportunity to vote on whether to have a mandate or not. Every host site had ample time to learn the system and how to run it. The state did pass contact information on for the trackwrestling support staff to the District Directors and the host site Tournament Directors. Every time I called trackwrestling with a problem my phone calls were answered. Trackwrestling might have made my job as a tournament director a little more hectic at the front end of the learning curve while I was learning the ropes. But it performed as advertised. By utilizing it and all its tools I needed less support staff to draw brackets and write out bout sheets prior to the tournament. I could focus my vollunteers attention on other areas of our event which overall made for a more enjoyable experience for our wrestlers and their families on Saturday. The �morning of� scratches were a piece of cake. I did not have the "100-plus" changes that Smokey has talked about in previous posts...trackwrestling did all that work for me. My staff and I spent time learning the bells and whistles and took the system for a test drive by running tourney earlier in the year with the software. Maybe that had a lot to do with our success�

One reason for the mandate was to draw everyone in�I am involved in managing both the D1N Sub, the District One tourney this weekend, and the State tournament the following weekend. Having both sub-districts and all four districts on board makes blending the multiple lists of qualifiers together a much easier task.