Being a 2nd year dad, i know all too well the difference between novice kids and Open kids. I also have 2 very different kids as wrestlers. Last year my youngest took off with the sport and we entered him in as many tournaments as possible, both Novice and Open. We finally had to stop entering him in novice tournaments because it was clearly a case of just working moves on the "easy" kids. My oldest is still in Novice this year again and is finally starting to like the sport, due to the fact that he has already won more matches in his first tournament this year than all of last year. (1 match won all of last year).

I believe that it is up to the Coach to use discretion when a wrestler needs to "graduate" from novice to open. However, some clubs don't always stick to that "Rule of thumb". I have already noticed some of our clubs "novice" wrestlers that probably need to be bumped up not only because they dominate in the novice tournaments, but because they need more tougher competition in order to make them better wrestlers.

I believe that when Derby held the Novice championships last year it was a good policy to have ONLY first year novice wrestlers attend. This made for some good quality wrestling and put everyone on a level playing field.

I would like to point out something that has bothered me as of late regarding novice tournaments.

In novice we are trying to encourage the kids and the parents to stay with the sport and every bit of encouraging is helpful. In this it dissappoints me when I see several novice brackets being 8 man and sometimes even 16 man double elimination brackets. These kids should be divided up into 4 man round robins as much as possible to 1. get more mat time. and 2. bring home something for their effort win or lose. I know this can be somewhat expensive for the tournament director, but are we not in this for the kids anyhow?