I know this is a battle that has been fought for a long time, but there has to be some way to improve it.

We hosted our first novice tournament, and I was dumbfounded by the number of kids that were entered or tried to be entered in the NOVICE tournament that were definitely not novice. We had a few wrestlers who competed won matches and one who even placed in folkstyle state last year in Topeka entered into the novice tournament. They entered them as average wrestlers so there was no trigger to look at their profile. We had one club who was honest and entered their wrestler as a state qualifier, we pulled his profile, seen he had won a match at state last year and did not allow him to participate, but after watching the tournament we started pulling profiles and found another one who placed at folkstyle state in the tournament. There was also individuals who are winning multiple opens as well as making the finals in the open division of tournaments like Park City last week entered in the Novice tournament. We had a couple wrestlers get hurt by one particular wrestler that had over 45 wins on his profile ( many of those wins were from big open tournaments).

I have began the process of going through some of the wrestlers that were idenfied as Non Novice due to their success in opens or even state qualifiers and placers. I am contacting their club contact to see if they were aware that these wrestlers are being entered into novice tournaments which is doing nothing but hurting the sport.

I know that many times the most aggressive wrestlers in the younger Novice is going to win more which is fine, but when they are hitting moves that many advanced kids don't hit well then they don't need to be in Novice.

Lance Geyer
Hays Wrestling Club