I would like to say thanks to Mark Stanley and the D1N folks that ran the tournament. It ran very smooth and got over pretty early (that includes being one of the last clubs out of the gym). I think their knowledge and use of Trackwrestling helped that quite a bit.
Truth in Lending: Up until sub-districts I was not convinced on the advantages of using Trackwrestling for open tournaments. The reason is that in Open tournaments you always get a lot of scratches and kids moving weight classes. This seemed to delay the start of a lot of open tournies this year. As a coach my biggest frustration (at open tournaments) was that the brackets could not be posted until all the scratches were complete, the tournament would then post the brackets. The challenge we had as a coaching staff was trying to get our kids match numbers and having to fight the crowd meanwhile the wrestling was getting started. This made for some very hectic scrambles when we had 25 coaches trying to cover 60-70 wrestlers at open tournaments.
I learned a very valuable advantage to Trackwrestling because of the D1N staff.....After the brackets are complete they can print a team report that gives you the first matches for all of your kids. They did that for us and we were able to get the coaches assigned, let the kids know their match numbers, etc. without fighting the "bracket crowd" and scrambling in order to not miss any of the kids.
I strongly recommend that in the future, if a tournament uses Trackwrestling, they print out that report and give a copy to each team during the Coaches meeting. This would allow the clubs to establish a system of being able to assign coaches,inform the wrestlers and their parents and get wrestling started without scrambling all the time.
Tournament directors will have to account for increased cost of paper but I think it is well worth it. At the open tournaments we were at a lot of them were delayed due to the # of scratches and then having to call kids to a mat because they didn't know their match #s or they didn't have a coach. These reports would help us coaches and clubs help solve the problem.
Just my thoughts. Again, great tournament in Holton! Thanks for all the hard work.
Shawn Budke