Kansas Wrestling Forums General Discussion Kids Folkstyle track wrestling

sucks. it takes too long for the directors to finalize the bracket. In Topeka today nobody knew how to run it and we got way behind. Then to top it off the medals were given away at one small opening with all the kids and parents trying to get the medals at one place. Is not a good idea as you can ask the parents and the people handing out the medals. I hope to wrestle in this tournament next year but if you dont change the way you give the medals it will be the last year. The weather had something to do with it but come on 2 hours late. then to wrestle 2 matches and have to wait 1 hour to get the medal they gave no thank you. You get the medals that derby or maize gives out maybe.

The reason for the late start is the weather. They had kids that weighed in the night before & did not show up to wrestle. They had to call in all coaches & find out who did not show. This took some time. If they would have bracketed like it was there would have been many scratches at the mat. You know how that works you have two minutes to wait for a kid thats at home watching tv. It would have been worse if they posted brackets with out getting an idea who was there. It also would have been worse if they bracketed by hand because of many scratches. There would have been many one & two man brackets & scratches. In my opinion they did the right thing.

Trackwrestling saved this tournament! It was late because people had to take twice as long to get there because of the road conditions. Luellen is right. Because of Saturday night weigh ins and the weather there was no way to be sure who was there short of asking all of the coaches. If you have ever ran a tournament with pencil and paper you would appreciate trackwrestling. It takes 100 man hours to set up a 500 kid tournament (brackets, bout sheets, wall brackets, etc.) with trackwrestling it takes about two hours! This year is the first year to use it and there will be growing pains and adjustments. Be happy that your wrestler got two matches instead of one or none as might have been the case without trackwrestling. It is the future so embrace it and help us make it better. Mark is a progressive thinking guy so I am sure the medals will be handled differently. You have to remember that the second session was starting and there were scratches to deal with for that session during the medal awarding. Sorry to have disappointed you but Trackwrestling is the future!

Thanks for the support Will. You were a lot of help yesterday morning, as well as Daren Denning, Dianne Yeagley and Shawnee Heights Wrestling Club, Bonner Springs Wrestling Club, Jackson Co Wrestling Club, some volunteers from Leavenworth Co who stepped up to help with hanging brackets and many, many others. I am sorry if I left anyone off the above list..Your help was very much appreciated.

In another thread I have already identified the award presentations as an area of our tournament that needs some improvement. I had a lot of goals and objectives going into Sunday...I tried to plan for problems that may have came about. But to be honest, I did not anticipate having to leave weigh-ins open until 9:30am. We originally planned to close them at 7:30, from 7:30 until 9:30 we still had over 100 first session kids still getting weighed in. They paid their entry fee and were trying to get to our event on time; it was not their fault that Mother Nature hit us with the bad weather. I was never able to fully catch up the 2 hours lost in the morning.

Will's point on the compressed schedule in between session 1 and 2 being a problem is valid. However, I plan to change the process of awards presentation regardless. In the future it will be handled in the west end of the commons area (oppisite the food line/concessions). I will be able to have it more organized and staffed with additional volunteers. The area we used this year probably would have worked without the punch we were dealt, but it is far from ideal.

Here is a copy of a post from another thread...Bookman, I am duplicating it hear because it addressee many of your concerns. I do hope to see you next year!

Mark Stanley
Jr. Viking Wrestling Club
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I would like to first thank all of the kids and their families that braved the weather on Sunday morning to attend our tournament.

At the end of the day, we ended with a little more than 120 scratches. I for one am thankful for trackwrestling. It allowed us rebracket this tournament in a timely manner and still wrestle 462 kids in some great brackets...and we still completed our last match by 5:30pm. We did end up with eight 2man RR brackets and eighteen 3man. I tried to avoid these situations, but with the scratches in some cases I could not. On the positive side, we had twenty-two brackets that were 5man or 6man RR brackets. My number one priority while slipping and sliding my way to the gym on Sunday morning became to give everybody that showed up some good matches. I think we achieved that objective

I know we had our shortcomings and we will work to correct those. Particularly we could have done a better job in the end of day awards presentations. In the future I will do that in a different area of the building, have a table for each age division, and more help. My group of volunteers has packaged up what we think are medals that were not picked up and I will do my best to get those to their respective teams in the coming weeks. Thanks again...

Mark Stanley
Jr. Viking Wrestling Club

I really appreciate the fact that my son was able to get four matches instead of what likely would have been two. His original bracket was an 8-wrestler bracket with seven wrestlers. Two did not show up to wrestle and the bracket was changed to a round robin. Although the wrestling started late, in his case he wrestled all four matches in a matter of maybe two hours. Great job in my opinion.

With all the bad press that track wrestling gets, I'm sure DPloyd4Now can testify that as far as following a tournament from a remote location trackwrestling is the only way to go. watching the bracket update in realtime, not to mention being able to see what happened at the tournament, not just who placed top 4 at the tournament. Getting to see what happened at a tournament across the state with kids my kid is going to face at State is very valuable. Then you add the time benefit that Cokeley mentioned. The positives outweigh the negatives hands down, especially considering most of the negatives I have read about seem to be tournament directors learning a new way of doing things.

Mark, I need to apologize if I sounded a little mad about your tournament. I realize the weather did put a damper on it and thats why it got started late. I do hope you change the way of getting your medals though. I actually felt more sorry for the people that were handing them out more so than for me having to wait. They handled what they could and had to listen to a few parents and coaches say some choice words. I appreciate the fact that my son did get 2 matches and got to see one kid that we wanted to. So if I sounded a little grumpy its cause im getting old and its getting late in the season. I expect everything to be ran perfect and with weather like that I now realize that it just wasnt meant to be. So im sorry and will probably see you next year.

I think showing the early list of participants gets people to move their kids around either to get more or less competition.
That I am not a big fan of - moving your kids around once you sent your childs name in at a certain weight for that week - live with it for that week. As long as they get a couple or few matches. I think I know the pro's and con's of Track Wrestling now. Sign-ups is more difficult for the individual clubs and less work for the host tournament. You need people with good computer skills and fast printers. Hope you do not have a power failure during a tournament or a computer crash that has all the info in it - tournaments need paper & pencil back up brackets/bout sheets in the event of a lightening strike. I do like Trackswrestling many applications. I like that the coaches from a club can get a print out of every one of their kids match on every mat - without having to stand in line and look at the wall brackets and recopy it 5 or 6 times for all the other coaches that are helping with 30 plus kids. About a 1 or 2 hour time saver for a coach - allowing for a little more time in the hopitality room. Trackwrestling or programs like it are the future and I guess I'll look back on this in about 2 or 3 years and say I can't believe I did not invent a system. Cell phones and pagers blew my mind. I still can not type in a contact name correct or text message. So in a nut shell I am not your computer guy to run Track wrestling. I do see the hundreds of volunteer man hours the program can save. Human error is causing the changes that start these tournaments late. Parents, coaches, club sign up people, tournament volunteers, bad weather - and the weather forcasters, growth of kids, to much cutting weight, dodging opponents, looking for tougher opponents, lack of knowledge of the computer system and its complexity, many many many factors cause a tournament to start late. All in all I have been to more High School, College tournaments that always start on time but they do not have as many participants and rarely scratch out. In the last 25 years I would say that 75 to 85 % of the kids tournaments that I have attended have all started at least 15 minutes late and up to 3 to 4 hours late. That (75-85)percentage may even be higher than that. But I'd like to say that all the parents over the last 25 years setting up all these tournaments are unbelievable and doing great things for kids - even if it starts 7 hours late. At least we all know what those kids are doing.

"With all the bad press that track wrestling gets, I'm sure DPloyd4Now can testify that as far as following a tournament from a remote location trackwrestling is the only way to go. watching the bracket update in realtime, not to mention being able to see what happened at the tournament, not just who placed top 4 at the tournament."

Patrick, you couldn't be more correct. Track Wrestling has been a savior for me (as has this talk forum - reading about news and events, reading what coaches, parents and wrestlers are discussing). If it is about wrestling, I am all for reading about it.

The only thing that I regret, and it is no fault of Track Wrestling, is that I don't know more of the kids that wrestle back home. I follow as many of the names that I know (most of them a year younger or a year older than my son since those are the kids I have seen wrestle throughout the six plus years he has been wrestling, and of course all of the kids that wrestle for our club). I agree with smokeycabin (tell all the kids on the team I said good luck the remainder of the year Coach) that Track Wrestling, or something equivalent, is the future and will only get better through time.