Mike,

Split tournaments are the ONLY way to go. While I feel a wrestler can be burned out in many various ways by the time he gets to high school, what our club found was it was the parents that burned out much earlier because of all day tournaments. It was too easy for a parent that was used to being in an over crowded gym from daylight to dusk to let their child go play bb and be gone for an hour on Saturdays.
One thing we learned about split tournaments last year was in order to allow the use of larger mats for the most ages of wrestlers the split of age groups should occur after all the entries are received. At the D2 north subs the 10 and under was the largest age group. Had the host club known this was going to be the case they would have divided the ages differently. What we proposed at our district meeting this year was that the age groups and their splits would be announced at the seeding meeting. This would allow us to use full size mats for all ages down thru 10 and under and possibly some of the 8 and under. Unfortunately, this was voted down. We'll make another run at it next year.