I'd like to personally thank everyone that had a hand in making this year's event possible. With all of the craziness over the past 12 months it was nice to have some sort of normalcy for a few days. There's no community stronger than the wrestling community!
This year's event brought in over 1700 wrestlers to the individual tournament, and we had 8 solid dual teams on Friday that competed in our 1st annual Belt Beatdown Dual Tournament. Congrats to Sicarios for a nail biter win in the finals against Kansas Mayhem, it was super intense! 10 individual states were represented at the 2021 Battle of the Belt this year.
First of all I'd like to thank all of the refs that committed to 2 full days of officiating. We had a number of younger, new faces making calls and it was great to see! The seasoned guys did an amazing job as always, and I saw a number of them giving tips to the young pups. Without you guys none of this could happen and I want you to know how grateful we are to have such amazing officials in the state of Kansas.
Thank you to all of the wrestlers/coaches that made the trip to compete, and thank you to their families for working with us to make sure the event went on as planned. Getting one session group out before the next was allowed to enter wasn't ideal, but it was a necessity to ensure we stayed under capacity and continued to keep the tournament rolling. There were some loaded brackets this year with top notch, match after match, competition. We've received a ton of positive feedback on the split sessions and the total length of each. Getting in and out in 3 hrs is something you don't normally see with 32-man brackets. I know some of those late matches started to fall back-to-back, so something we'll look at going forward.
A huge shoutout to the Maize Wrestling Club families for donating 3 full days of service to our wrestling community. Whether it was setting up, manning tables, coaching, running errands, tearing down, or any of the other 1000s of jobs that come with a tournament of this size, you all owned it! I'm beyond proud to call you all family! We couldn't pull this off without you. Fred and Crystal once again played power couple and headed this thing up, and I am forever in debt for all of the help you provide to seeing this tournament through, year after year (not to mention all of the other club related stuff you guys take care of). I promise it does not go unnoticed!
There were also a number of teams that stuck around following the conclusion of the tournament and helped us clean up (Great Bend and Topeka Blue Thunder for sure). Somehow we knocked all that out in under 1.5 hrs. Your help was greatly appreciated!
-------------------------------------
As always there are things to learn from/improve going forward:
Weigh-Ins
Friday night was chaotic to say the least. This was the 1st year that we hosted all onsite weigh-ins. One of the main reasons was to ensure the spectator coupons and wrestler bands were handled correctly. Trying to stay under a 2000 person capacity was a challenge to say the least. We had over 1300 kids to get weighed in on Friday night and we knocked that out in under 2 hrs. Not allowing parents in with the younger wrestlers wasn't ideal, but was necessary to ensure we stayed under capacity. We're tossing around ideas to speed this process up going forward and to allow some parental supervision. Hopefully we aren't in the same "Covid-boat" in 2022.
Session Capacity Restrictions
Again, due to Covid restrictions we were forced to stay under a 2000 person max capacity at any given time. We originally were going to trust families to come and go as asked (and I feel most did a great job of that). We had a buffer in place for each session, but with our larger sessions that buffer was only ~400 people. You add in some that aren't supposed to be there and that 400 disappears quickly. During our 8u session the decision was made to push back the start of the remaining 10u and 12u sessions to allow the transition from 8u to 10u to run smoothly, and it did. We also decided to not allow anyone through the doors until their appropriate session. This drastically cut down on the number of people in the arena and allowed us to continue to run the tournament.
Awards
As most are aware, our champion belts were still at sea the day of our event and we apologize for that. Our outfitter has taken the blame and will help us make right. Belts are schedule to be in mid-February and we'll ensure every champion receives his/her belt in a timely fashion. We will mail all out-of-state belts, and are planning on getting the in-state ones to their respective district tournaments. There was also some oversite on our part in terms of the awards for the girls/novice divisions. In the past we have wrestled through 6th place for both to provide additional mat time, but have only provided medals for top 4 in girls and top 3 in novice. We combined our open/novice/girls flyers this year into one and overlooked the language on the awards. My apologies to any wrestlers that this affected, but we didn't have those awards on hand to provide to those athletes. We will look to medal through 6th place in all divisions going forward.
Other
We'd gladly take feedback about any other issues that we can look to improve on going forward.
-------------------------------------
Thank you again for everyone's support for this year's Battle of the Belt and good luck to all of the athletes through the remainder of their seasons! Continue pushing forward and never settle!!
Derek Patterson
Maize Wrestling Club
