Chief:
Despite the fact that Wichita Northwest's Trey Page is a great wrestler (and even greater kid), I believe that its doubtful that he'll find a spot on the Northwest team this year as he likely can't make weight at 189 lbs (he continually struggled to make weight last year and has grown since) and Caylor and Heithouse (both defending state champions at 215 lbs & heavyweight respectively) look pretty solid for those weights. My "guess" is that Trey will concentrate on football.
This would be an unfortunate loss for Wichita Northwest and for Trey Page. He is definitely a high quality varsity wrestler and should be competing for a state placing finish next year. This is a problem that sometimes occurs in high school and college wrestling due to less opportunity for heavier wrestlers due to fewer weight classes at these weights. A possible alternative would be a system like the NAIA has where it lets schools take more than one wrestler in a weight class to its national tournament. I have heard that the NAIA schools are limited to the total number of wrestlers that they can take to the tournament to a number like ten. I believe the national college club wrestling system also allows for more than one wrestler per weight at its tournaments. I think Page and Caylor both competed at 215 in the Kansas Kids tournament series at the end of last year's high school season.
This problem does not develop in sports like high school track & field since each school can qualify more than one athlete per event. Page, Caylor and Heithaus if they were discus throwers could all have the opportunity to place at State in the same year. It is very unfortunate that football players like Page sometimes need to lose a lot of weight to find a spot on the varsity wrestling team. Some of them do make the decision not to wrestle. They decide to lift weights, gain weight and increase strength for football instead. I believe it is the reason that football coaches are not more supportive of their players coming out for wrestling. Many of these football coaches really are not interested in their players losing weight during their football off seasons.
