Thanks for the feedback.

This was our first tournament, and our biggest difficulty came with awards. Order and production delays (because of the Chinese New Year, believe it or not) severely limited our options. We customized what we could with the first place medals and brackets for the open divisions but we were a little stuck. Rather than hand out uncustomized generic medals to the novices--which was our only other option--we decided to go with the customized ribbons.

Next year we will have more lead time and the awards will be better--we are shooting for some sort of crown or real big crown medal for first place--and we will post them in advance.

That said, if we have open and novice divisions next time, the novice divisions won't get the same awards as the open divisions. That's pretty standard practice. We treat the novice side, including for our own kids, just like Lance Geyer said: for teaching and learning. Combined Open/Novice tournaments allow novice wrestlers to learn alongside more advanced kids without getting thumped, and they also let novice wrestlers experience a bigger style tournament and have something to shoot for.

Sorry if some of the novice kids did not like the ribbons, but all of them got to wrestle against fair competition at a big tournament alongside some of the best wrestlers in the state and region.

Tom Bruscino
Lion Elite