The only problems I have against split format tournaments (younger kids in the morning, Older kids in the afternoon type) is 1. Which age groups do we split up? and 2. Different ages being split up incorrectly.

Let me clarify. I have seen some split format tourneys have the 6U, 8U, 14U in the morning with 10U, 12U and 16U in the afternoon. This poses a couple of problems while in the same breath it helps the tourney flow better and keeps parents happy and unhappy at the same time. There will be differing opinions on either side of this issue, but for the sake of discussion lets just talk about the issues with the above forementioned split.

Having 2 kids wrestling, one in 8U and one in 10U would discourage myself from attending this hypothetical split tournament, simply because I would have to be there all day for both my kids. I am certain that this situation probably happens a lot when a family has multiple wrestlers in the family.

From a different point of view, I prefer not to have my 6U 43lb kid wrestling on a mat next to a 14U 190lb match. simply because of the closeness to each other on the mats and the dangers of possibly getting my wrestler hurt.

Now I know that these would be extreme examples but the possibility does exist of this happening.

Also, my sons like to watch the older boys compete at that elite level and I agree that waiting for 3 hours between matches is a bit long for any wrestler to keep his competitive edge.

In fact just last week at the tournament in Morrison, Oklahoma, my son had his first match about an hour from the start time then waited 3 hours for his next match, then since they were trying to speed things up and moving match number to different matches the time between his 2nd match and his 3rd match was about 2 matches in between or a total of 10 minutes. This was obviously a messed up situation, since going from losing in his second match put him on the backside of the bracket and the match numbers were a bit too close, and he was drained emotionally and physically from his second match it showed in his 3rd match. There needs to be a happy medium there, but enough about my ranting.

I just want to clarify that I do support split tournaments for all Novice and Open tournaments alike, so long as they run it properly. And I would also like to say that I believe that the "Nebraska format" I spoke about in an earlier reply should be looked at more in an effort of keeping these kids and their parents in the sport longer, and always remember that we do this for the kids sake!