Hello, I am the owner of Trackwrestling.com, and I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to explain what happened and offer suggestions to help prevent this in the future. I will start by saying I take responsibility for any of the problems that occured on Saturday. It is my job to understand exactly how tournaments are run, and then offer my suggestions to tournament personel on the best way to utilize Trackwrestling to accomplish what they want to accomplish. I did not do a good enough job communicating with tournament personel on how the event was going to be run, and in retrospect gave them instructions that did not fit with how I think things should have been done.
I was under the impression that this event was a 100% pre-registration event that was pre-bracketed because there would be very few if any changes the morning of the tournament. I thought pre-bracketing and numbering all the matches would be a good idea because it would save time on the morning of the event, and the charts were hung on the wall so people could see them as they came through the doors in the morning. This would be a good plan if there were not many changes, but it is now my understanding that there were lots of changes the morning of the event, and all of the changes caused mat schedules and bout numbers to change dramatically. Whenever there is potential for lots of changes, it is a good idea to just wait to bracket until that morning after the changes are made. In this situation, it was too late, and the choice was then made to just re-number all the charts and start over with a fresh set of bout numbers for every mat (rather than have lots of duplicate bout numbers like 11A, 11B, 12A, 12B, etc.). All these changes were not expected, and that was the cause for the delayed start. If there were only a couple changes, it would have been easy to just make a change, and re-number the mat affected (without changing the bout numbers on that mat by very much at all).
Here is how I think these type of events should be run in the future. If you have 100% pre-registration, that is great, but if you are going to have quite a few changes on the morning of the event, then I would not bracket anything prior to the morning of the event. It sounds like weigh-ins end and there is an hour and a half before wrestling is supposed to start. This gives you plenty of time to bracket out the entire event starting from scratch. Rather than having brackets hanging on the walls when people come through the door, I would have the weigh-in sheets hanging on the walls in place of the brackets. This allows people to double check to make sure they are in the right division and weight class. There are functions that allow you to delete wrestlers that never weigh-ed in, assign the correct bracket type to a weight class based on the # of wrestlers, build the brackets, optimally assign weights to mats based on actual wrestling time, and number the matches assigned to mats all in about 5 minutes. Even if it took and extra 1/2 hour after weigh-ins were done to get all the data entered and double checked in the system, that still means you would have brackets ready shortly there after, and then it is just printer time. With 500 kids averaging 5 kids per weight class, that is 100 charts and a good printer should have them printed in about 5 minutes. Bout sheets to start the event would be about 10 per mat, so if you were running 10 mats that would be another 5 minutes of printer time. The program also has the ability to print a "Team Bout Schedule" which gives a team a list of all kids on their team, who they wrestle, what mat they are on, their bout #, etc. Anyone with a mobile device can get access to this information instantly on trackwrestling.com/mobile
There are surely details I left out about how exactly everything would work, but hopefully that gives people a general idea of what we think would be a good solution for these type of events. If any of my above assumptions are wrong, please let me know. The more information I have regarding these events, and how they are run, the better I will be able to assist anyone who wants to run an event in the future.
We are available for questions, so if anyone wants to contact me directly, you can email justin@trackwrestling.com or you can call 608-554-1501.
Thank you,
Justin