First of all we would like to thank all of the wrestlers and teams that came out and competed at the 2018 Battle of the Belt this past weekend. At the end of the day, we had somewhere around 1650 wrestlers competing for a belt (300+ more than last year's tournament). It was great seeing a number of girls competing in our new girl's division this year as well. Lots of tough young ladies out there! The competition was stellar as always! I was also very impressed with the Rudis store! Those guys sure know how to roll.
Few issues to address:
1) Ticket Sales -- I was told that the line to purchase tickets was insane. We had the ticket office open Friday night during weigh-ins, but with so many traveling in late on Friday or early on Saturday, I'm sure that there was still a large number of families needing to purchase tickets on Saturday morning. The addition of 300+ wrestlers this year (and families) only added to the congestion. We are in the works of figuring out a better system for next year; perhaps an online option to purchase ahead of time.
2) Novice Division -- every year we run into out-of-state wrestlers entering the novice division "illegally" if you would. We released the wrestler list early this year with hopes of weeding out some of those wrestlers, which we did in some instances, but obviously some were missed. Some of those wrestlers have multiple Trackwrestling profiles, so the only way to truly catch them is to search by their name, not just clicking on the entry as it was linked to different profile. We will continue to do the best that we can with policing this in the future.
3) Floor Congestion -- I know there was some floor congestion this year preventing some parents from seeing the mats. Again, this is something we run into each year, but is somewhat unavoidable when you're dealing with the numbers that we had.
4) 5th/6th Place Matches -- this year we decided to place through top 6 in the open division and do away with true 2nd. Overall, I think this was a good move. There were some very tough brackets and this allowed kids the opportunity to get another match, as well as earn a medal. Around 11:30 on Friday night, I noticed that the brackets were not set up for 5th/6th placing (still true 2nd as we did last year). I quickly got with our Trackwrestling coordinator and had him resolve the issue. For some reason though, not all of the brackets were fixed correctly. I'd like to personally apologize to any of the 5th/6th place wrestlers that were not able to wrestle that match.
5) Awards Table -- the arena had the head table and awards table on the elevated platforms (without our asking or knowledge) prior to us entering the arena for setups on Friday. This caused a ton of congestion come awards time. We will address this issue with the arena going forward.
6) 2nd Session Start Time -- I'm more upset about this than anything. I feel like we could have started the 2nd session around 2pm (I believe it was about 3pm when we finally got rolling). As mats were finishing up in the 1st session we moved matches around, but started running into computer issues and whatnot. We then ran into the issues of not having the allotted time between matches if we were to run weight classes on more than 2 mats. The excessive increase in numbers from last year didn't help things either. We had no idea we were looking at roughly 1700 wrestlers until we closed registration. I feel like after the 2nd session got going things ran pretty smooth, and a 9:30pm finish time was pretty reasonable considering all things.
We would love to hear any feedback, positive or negative, that you may have so that we can continue to build this tournament in the years to come.
Again, thank you to all the participants, coaches, officials, parents, and volunteers!
KANSAS WRESTLING IS ALIVE AND WELL!!
Also - we had a few items found at the conclusion of the tournament. If you are missing something please email me at maizewrestlingks@gmail.com with a brief description and contact info.
