Bend,
I am not sure where you get "top 5%" and "every weekend". I think you might be missing the point. Super 32 was one tournament that attracted high school wrestlers from across the country the other being the USA Junior Nationals in Fargo. What made them great is that there were no other options so many of the best kids and lots of the other 95% too gathered in one place creating some super brakets. (I will admit that above 152 many wrestlers play football and were missing from Super 32.) This type of gathering attracts college coaches who have VERY limited budgets to recruit with so they seek tournaments such as NHSCA, Fargo, and Super 32 where they can view many, many college prospects. The Vegas event doesn't really seem to be about just creating another opportunity as it would have been scheduled on a different weekend. It has the appearance of trying to compete against the reputation of Super 32 by advertisiing that they have this or that wrestler who ranked and from OH or some other far away state. In my opinion, if their mission is to save CA College wrestling they would have had this event the weekend before on the campus of one of their remaining programs (perhaps Fullerton since they just received the axe for the second time) to raise money and awareness for those programs. This would have given kids from all over the country the choise to attend both instead of watering down the overall competitiveness of both by scheduling them at the same time. Splitting the numbers up also makes both events less atractive to a fiscally responsible college coach. For us in Kansas, the best places to get noticed are the aforementioned big 3 because our communistic high school organization made up of member schools administrators doesn't have the vision to see that they are hurting our best wrestlers and wrestling teams by not allowing them to compete in the big 3 HS tournaments (RTOC, Beast, and Ironman) or any tournament more than 500 miles from Kansas. However, our bands can travel to the four corners of the US and to Europe if they want to! I digress.
Bottom line Bend, less super events means less exposure to college coaches and that sucks.
Didn’t think I would have to show my work! But here we go. The 5% number was a conservative estimation of the number of “Top Level” (Top 20 ranked) kids that would be desirable to have at a National Tournament.
The NFHS reported 259,688 high school wrestlers for the 2007-2008 season. This was a 2,422wrestler increase from the year before, this continued an upward trend. So lets conservatively say we have 260,000 High School wrestlers(I like round numbers)
For this sample lets eliminate half of these kids because they are playing football. That brings us down to 130,000. Again lets try to be somewhat realistic with these numbers and eliminate 3/4 of these kids because they aren’t serious enough wrestlers to participate in any preseason tournament. That brings us to 32,000 wrestlers that might consider participating in a preseason tournament ,if it was available close enough to home.
Now if the Supper 32 truly had the best 20 kids in the country at each weight class that would be only 280 wrestlers. Note! This 280 number is greatly inflated! Even if this were the only preseason Tournament in the county you would not get half this number because of football , travel expense, ect.
. As it stands now 280 is under 1% of 32,000. It seems to me that to better serve the majority of wrestlers we need more opportunities not less.
