Mike
I am a long time proponent of the split format tournament as well as other ways to make the pre-state tournament series tournaments easier and more fan and wrestler friendly. When i was coaching high school, i often had kids who did not go out because their parents and themselves had bad experiences with the pre-dawn to past sundown tournament nightmares. As a wrestling addict, i was in my element with the long days and honestly did not know any other way of doing things. My eyes were opened a great deal after spending time in Nebraska and California. In Nebraska we had more of a slotted tournament format where age groups had a couple hour window for wrestling, the weigh in nightmare was eliminated by weighing in the kids as they come in, grouping them in to 4, 5 man round robin brackets and then keeping the kids matside and wrestling the brackets off, it was about 30 minutes in between matches and the stay was about 2 to 2.5 hours at the most. In Cali, we had the straight split format, but the kids weighed in at the same time, so the time was no different. In both states, the entry numbers were controlled and in california, the wrestling associations had groups of people that travelled place to place to run off tournaments, they had the scoreboards, tables, bands, bout cards, all of the above and hauled it around in a trailer, it was great for consistency but what a job. Kansas by far has the best wrestling i have seen in my travels, i think at times though we tend not to think outside the box of doing it a bit different. Thanks for the forum
Klint Deere