We had a wonderful tournament in D1 today. After reviewing a few of the other districts TW sites it appears that all four districts have some very good kids moving into next week’s tournament. It will be a grand event as it is every year.
As Hossus pointed out, I made a statement on another thread about the goals to standardize many areas of the qualifying series that were previously left up to the individual districts to decide. If you refer to the
minutes of the January 30th, 2011 Executive Committee meeting you will find that the Executive Committee did discuss these areas and voted on many of them. If you don't want to read the minutes in their entirty, you will find the discussion in Agenda Item 6. All four Districts were represented at this meeting. Tom Richard made a motion that each of the sub-district and districts follow the same format. This motion passed unanimously. There was quite a bit of discussion about what this statement actually meant and to provide clarity of purpose a series of motions were put forth on different aspects of tournament operations; each was voted on. Those included and which passed by unanimous vote were, one person being responsible for setting up registration information in trackwrestling, seeding criteria, minimum number of seeded wrestlers, how to treat non-seeded wrestlers, tournament start times, and filling of the district brackets with 5th/6th place qualifiers. A motion concerning sub-district and district weigh in times was made that it should be from 6-8pm on Friday night and 6-7am on Saturday morning. This motion passed by a 13-2 vote. A motion was proposed to allow satellite weigh in sites in order to make it easier on families and the tournament host sites. This motion failed by a vote of 11-4.
These minutes have been posted for some time and as previously stated each district was represented at the meeting. I am confident that the integrity of our qualifying series is not in jeopardy and that when things varied from what was voted on that reasonable people made decisions for the right reasons in mind. However as I was quoted as saying earlier in this thread, I believe that it was, is and should be the goal of the State Tournament Committee to standardize the State Series of tournaments. The only way I know to make this happen is to have a consistent set of rules that are followed by every tournament in the series. While this goal was not perfectly obtained this year, it does not minimize its importance in my eyes. On nearly every issue you can think about there will be disagreement. The way we run our State Series is no different in that regard. If we have any hope in making consistency happen it is the job of those in charge of setting the rules to provide clarity and for those running the individual tournaments to abide by what was agreed to. If you feel that an established rule is wrong...don't just ignore it; set out to change the rule. As I was once told by a county sheriff in western KS when I was stopped for going a little too fast, even "dumb" rules need to be followed and ignorance of law is no excuse. If I choose to get behind the wheel, then it my job to know the rules of the road.
The Executive Committee is meeting on Friday night before State and I am sure we will be doing an after action review of how our qualifying tournaments were ran. If any of you have issues you would like to be discussed then get with your representatives and let them know you wish's.
Have a good week of practice! Anyone that would like to help set up for state is welcome to come to the Expocentre on Friday morning and help in the effort! We are getting started at 7am so we can be ready for the kids at 2pm when they open the doors. See you all next week.