Jake's Dad, I am the person who setup the Tournament with TrackWrestling. When I go back and look, then compare to the rules, I see that the upper weigh classes for those age groups were left out.
When I setup the tournament, I compared the weight classes per division with another tournament and imported those settings. I assumed that they were the State defined weight classes and did not look any further.
I know we work really hard to create brackets that are competitive, fair, and seated. We always want wrestlers to have someone to wrestle and not just give them a metal. We do combined brackets at times, but always post on the bracket when it is combined.
I am not the Tournament Director, only the TrackWrestling Admin. I see a few things that I will bring up with the Tournament Committee that could help the way we can do next year’s tournament to help prevent this type of thing from happening again.
1) Actually post on our Flier and on usawks website, what weight class we will use. We will still combine weight classes, but at least it would be easier for someone to bring to our attention when we leave out a weight class.
2) Request that all HWT weight class wrestlers provide us with the estimated weigh a wrestler weighs so we can monitor that the weight spread is within the rules.
I am glad to hear your son is not seriously hurt. This was a mistake on my part when I built the tournament. I do wish that the parents would have brought this to their coaches attention, who should of then brought it to our attention so we could have fixed this.
We would never intentionally build a tournament where we think a youth might get hurt. An example of this is why you saw funny numbering of the MAT's so we could keep heavier kids from wrestling next to smaller kids.
Thanks for the input; it will only help make other tournaments in the future better.
Jim Lund
TrackWrestling Admin for the MOKWC club.
