A lot of this stems from having 22 teams in attendance at a one-day tournament, 23 if you count the unattached kids who were added. Many of the teams had no where near a full roster, so it is hard to gauge exactly how many teams will bring what weights. I’ve talked to the administration about the problem with the 5 match rule and the only way to solve it is to either reject some teams’ invitations or possibly make a cut off for the amount of wrestlers in each bracket based off winning percentage. However this is only if they want to keep the Eureka tournament as a one day tournament.
The administration is also open to the idea of turning this tournament into a two-day tournament by inviting several more teams. My preference would be that they run it as a pool tournament the 1st day to allow teams better utilization of competition points. This will allow their less skilled wrestlers to have more mat time. Then on the second day take the top one or two wrestlers in each pool and make an 8-man bracket. This is the same format that Eudora uses and it seems to work very well. With less teams using double duels for competition points and switching to more popular dual, pool, or round robin style tournaments it would bring more quality teams who would like to attend in addition to the teams already in attendance.
When I was in grade school this tournament used to host programs like Valley Center, Prairie View, and Mulvane, it could use a few quality 4A programs to help beef up the brackets. They were having to compete against some of the top 321A programs in the mid to late 90s teams like Herington, Caney Valley, Southeast-Saline, and Fredonia. All of which were placing multiple people in the state tournament. In the past few years we’ve even had Louisburg, Hugoton, and Pratt come to the tournament who have all had nice showings at the 4A state tournament.
The tournament ran much longer than it should have because of the 45 minute rule for wrestlers, blood time, injury time, a 20 minute lunch break for the referees and table help, and of course the seeding meeting ran 30 minutes long, but these are all things that will happen at wrestling tournaments. Hopefully, next year all of the problems will be fixed next year with the Eureka Tournament and it will have people in Kansas saying that it is one of the best small school tournaments in the state.
