Kansas Wrestling
Posted By: Spexy Track wrestling question? - 01/17/10 07:25 PM
How come track wrestling can not seed kids by their "rank". Saw multiple brackets at Windfeild where the top 2 kids wrestled the first match of the day. Yes, I know wrestle every match to the best of your ability, but would'nt you think your finals should be the 2 best not an "A" against a "C". Just curious how TW does it.
Posted By: HEADUP Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/17/10 10:59 PM
not sure how it's done. but do you know how they were sent in? some parents have a hard time with the a,b,c,d rankings!!
Posted By: Pelland Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/17/10 11:19 PM
When the tournament director sets up the tournament, there is a setting called separation criteria, and below is how it reads.

Activate this if you want to specify additional separation criteria for creating and building brackets. For Example, you may specify a skill level for bracketing purposes.
Use Separation Criteria: Yes or No

If the tournament director chooses to use the separation criteria, and I assume they will, then here is an example of how a bracket will work. Say you have 1A, 2B, 1C, and 4D wrestlers in an 8 man bracket, and the tournament director uses the separation criteria, then the A wrestler will get the top seed, the two B wreslers will get the 2 & 3 seeds (computer randemly chooses which B wrestler gets the 2 seed), the C wrestler will get the 4 seed, and so on.
Posted By: Ledford Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 01:38 AM
We had a few challenges with seeding criteria...When I set track up, I had seperation criteria selected, but some reason it did not transfer in tournament from pre-reg... After talking with Justin at TrackWrestling, it seems that you have to make sure seperation criteria is set-up in actual "registration" and not "pre-reg"....

We understand it did give some match-ups that should have occured in finals etc...We will make sure it does not happen in future

Thanks
Posted By: in it to win it Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 02:35 AM
But your not the only tournament that it's happened to this season.....Emporia & Paola had the same situations in seeding/bracketing.
Posted By: ath618 Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 03:53 AM
Looking at the separation criteria for the winfield tournament most of the kids were not even ranked. This could lead to track wrestling voiding the separation criteria and just bracket the kids. I do not know if this is what happened but if everyone entering their wrestler would rank them it could solve a few problems in the future.

Spexy, I do not know what your young wrestler's bracket looked like but you could check the rankings of the other wrestlers by clicking on groups then your wrestlers age and weight. It may have been that the other kid did not send in a ranking.
Posted By: smokeycabin Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 10:56 AM
The only time during the year we really have a seeding is subdistricts. That is coaches are present to discuss records, head to head match ups, state and national finish, etc. I think for the most part tournament directors try to get it right - but with around 80 brackets there is no way they know all the kids from every team acrossed the state. It is not as easy as a high school tournament that only has 14 weights. Seeding at the HS level even becomes ????? If the best kids meet before the finals they just end up having that match a little early, hopefully the other kid gets third and they move on. It is NEARly impossible to get coaches to go to every kids tournament and go to a seeding meeting. I'll take my chances as a coach and send in the kids ranking/rating and let them wrestle. I do not have enough hours in a week to go and sit in a seeding meeting on a ALLDAY Thursday before a tournament and seed every kid. I prefer NOT - that the best kids meet in the first match. But if it happens at the Mill Valley, Wichita, JC Classic or Salina, Manhattan or whereever - we will just deal with it. The other problem is some teams do ot even send in a rating - on purpose or by accident.
Posted By: sportsfan02 Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 11:10 AM
If every tournament should be totally about the competition, as some would lead us to believe, then does it matter if the two best wrestlers in each bracket meet the first match?
Posted By: Spexy Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 11:32 AM
Depends on if your a parent or coach, or the kid wrestling...Kids want to make the finals...Most parents and all coaches want the competition...
Posted By: smokeycabin Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 01:51 PM
Most tournament directors have have been: wrestler, coach, parent, and tournament director, bracket master, sat in on seeding meetings, janitor, mat mover, table worker, weighin, skin checks, combining brackets, bathroom cleaner, moved mats, setup, tear down, ordered medals, sign up kids late because of weather & travel problems, fixed brackets where parents entered kids in the wrong age or weight bracket, made mistakes, and do the best they can with the volunteers they get. As far a trackwrestling goes - it is only as good as the information
that gets entered and provided by each team. If there are 6 kids in a bracket that are rated "A" wrestlers it does not know who beat who when and where and what the scores were. One of the "B" wrestlers could have beaten one of the "A" wrestlers during the season and trackwrestling does not know that either.
Posted By: Joe Knecht Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/18/10 03:54 PM
Smoky is spot on from my experiences and have seen that scenario played out many times. This weekend I saw "C" wrestlers beat multiple "A" wrestlers in a bracket. Does that mean the A or the C wrestler is incorrect. The system only knows what you tell it currently.

I do agree seperating the top 2-4 best wrestlers in double-elim bracket as it makes it more interesting. I could even see a future enhancement that takes past results based on TW events into consideration but honestly don't see the value for most local non-"National" tournaments. I'm curious if the majority of clubs really care of the "seeding" for these tournaments beyond basic criteria (A-D & Club seperation)?

Even when specific criteria has been established (A=State Champ, B=State Placer, etc)I've seen kids sent in different than what that criteria states.

As an aside, another setting that can impact the way kids are bracketed in TW is the function that seperate kids from the same club. This is optional and has limitations depending on how many from a given club and the type of bracket used but is useful from keeping kids from the same club from wrestling in the first round. (in elimination brackets)
Posted By: Jim Lund Re: Track wrestling question? - 01/19/10 03:31 AM
Track does not do a very good job separating wrestlers based on the rankings A,B,C,D or 1,2,3,4. It is used to separate wrestlers not seed wrestlers.

Track separates based off of Teams first then if separation criteria is used, it keeps 1's away from 1's - 2's way from 2's, ect. It generally is only for first round bouts.

When I use Track for an Open Tournement, I ask for a ranking/skill level, then manually seed all the brackets to keep best wrestler apart and keep teams on opposite sides of the bracket. Not every bracket is seeded out to the 8th or 16th seed, just the first couple, then let track do it's best from there. Seeding is hard, most of the time you are just looking at the skill level and just have to trust how coaches enter the wrestlers ability.


Technical Track Stuff for other Track Admins:
In track I change the extra field to be skill level.
In Pre-Registration I require the Skill Level field.

In pre-registration I add an extra field ( skill level ) which asked for the ranking A,B,C,D. This has 3 fields associated to it... value, text, and order. I associate the value with A,B,C,D and order with 1,2,3,4. In the text field I add a description to label what I'm interpreting as a A wrestler ( A - State Qualifier / Placer ),(B - Generally Places ), ect.

When you import into the Track site from the Pre-Registration site you select 2 additional fields. 1) The Value field to the separation criteria. 2) the data field to the Skill Level field.

This gives you a very clear picture when you are looking at a weight class to seed your wrestlers.


I hope this helps more than it confuses..... smile

Jim Lund
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