As Will is aware, we used "block" weights for our Novice tournament in Feb. We used the actual weights that the kids weighed in, and everyone seemed pretty pleased with it. Several coaches commented on how most kids were able to wrestle four to five matches and they liked the fact that the kids were able to see some new faces because they were grouped a little different depending how what their actual weight had been. The other thing that we did was to use round robins only. We used 6-man, 4-man and best 2 out of 3. It worked really well. The problem we did face was the amount of weigh-ins we had Sat morning. We did offer Friday night, but with apologies, didn' advertise it as well as we should have. I agree with Coach Knox, we should allow more time between weigh-ins and start time. Most of us feel we have to start at 9:00am, so we state this on the flyer, but if we say we're not starting until 10:00am, people aren't going to be happy about that either. Luckily, because we did use track wrestling, and we did do block wieghts, and even after we had 45 scratches, we started about 40 minutes late. I know this for a fact because my son sang the National Anthem at 9:35am. We were able to add some kids into the system after wrestling started (they were accidently deleted due to operators error), which did not delay any wrestling at all. It changed two brackets and allowed these two boys to wrestle. Yes, it was a little over-crowded in the beginning, due to the church service being held, but after that was completed, we able to spread out a little. Yes we had some other issues here and there. But overall, I would do it again and again. Track Wrestling saved me this year. We doubled in entries this year and I would not have been able to get it done with out it! The past two years, I have taken on this event myself, asking for very little help from others (because of my own stupidity) and I love to do it, but I will never do another without track wrestling or another program like it.
Sorry I've been so long winded. Take care, GOOD LUCK AT STATE, and mostly Happy Easter to all!
