YOUTHCOACH16

Valid points Mr Moon and we are trying to keep that from happening. The coaches were supposed to sign an agreement at the beginning of the year agreeing to our rules. I think there were a few violations of this by lack of communication and those have been addressed. We are in a growing process and with that there will be hurdles we have to cross but thats a good problem to have. We knew this decesion would be a sensitive issue but we felt it was whats best for our state. We have to lok at the big picture and the state as a whole and we think this will make us stronger.

Mr House made some good points as well. I think as Memphis wrestling continues to grow we will see this same issue with Southaven and the other communities right across the line. I personally feel that allowing these teams to compete only makes our kids better and our state stronger and thats what our focus should be on.

Hopefully I can clarify some of the things being said on here and explain how the process works and how it came to be. For years North georgia has participated in our Chattanooga tournaments as they are part of the Chattanooga community. At the end of the year they have always been excluded from our post season tournaments unless they wrestled for a Chattanooga club. The same issue happens on the Ky line and Bristol/va line. We proposed at our last board meeting to allow these kids to compete in our region and state if they meet certain criteria, mainly chosing which state they were going to compete in. The kids wrestling from Georgia are not competing in their states post season tournaments. They chose to wrestle with Tennessee instead. Now as far as the kids from Kentucky wrestling in both state tournaments this is clearly against the rules and they have been informed they cant compete in the Tn state tournaments. The reasoning behind allowing them to compete with us are many but the main reason is we are trying to grow our numbers and level of competetion. Tn aau is an organization and a member of the southeastern aau district. There are many cross boundary rules at the national level and we touched based with the aau home office to make sure this is legal and allowed and it was approved. We have to decide as a state what our goals are. We felt that allowing kids to compete in the communities they for all practical purposes live in and at the same time raising our numbers and making our state more competetive was our main goal. We even had the teams sign a contract stating they were whithin 50 miles and they would not wrestle with another states post season tournaments. There are many issues we have to work around such as middle school leagues not allowing their kids to compete outside of their leagues so that limits the number of aautournaments they can participate in prior to the aau post season tournaments. We try to make decisions that are best for the kids and sometimes those decesuions arent always as easy as black and white. We will revisit this ruling again in the spring at our board meeting but for this year the out of state kids whithin 50 miles who have signed our contract and have not wrestled in another states tournament will be allowed to participate.

That a boy Jamal ! Congrats to you and your proud coach Kevin! Your old Warriors did you proud Kevin.

That does nothing to grow the sport. That allows more kids into the state tournament but it isnt making more overall wrestlers or teams.

How is Russianbears opionion less valid than yours? He brings up good points as opposed to just thinking adding divisions will magically make wrestlers appear out of thin air. Do you honestly think the difference of over 6 million people in Georgia and North Carolina doesnt have an impact with their larger participation numbers? Its simple math. If you have 6 million more people you are going to have more schools, more wrestlers, and more coaches. Also their population is more centrally located as opposed to Tennessees being spread out over 600 miles. Another glaring problem we have is the shortage of dedicated , passionate wrestling coaches. How many teams in Tennessee are really competetive? How many coaches are willing to put in the time it takes to build a strong program from the ground up? Counting public and private schools I would say its safe to say there arent more than 30 schools in Tennessee that are somewhat serious about wrestling. As evidenced by the huge gap in success from the top 10 teams or so this fact is pretty clear. I think everyone is all for growing this sport and making it stronger but more research needs to be done before we think simply adding more divisions will make schools take on a new sport. There are other options such as adding more divisions in the duals. We could also have one individual tournament all together but keep seperate team points for the different divisions. Tennessee simply does not have a competetive enough field to warrant multiple divisions in the individual state tournament. This isnt an elitist or old school opionion. This is an opionion of someone who thinks the beauty of our sport is that it forces young men to grow up and work harder if they want to suceed. They learn in our sport that they can overcome difficulties. They learn that it doesnt matter how tall they are, how fast they are, how strong they are they can improve and accomplish great things with something called work and dedication. Maybe I am wrong, maaybe that is an old school attitude. Heck lets just make 10 divisions so everybody feels good about themselves and mommy and daddy can say their kid is a state champ. Seems to be thats the way the rest of our society is so why not ruin one of the last pure things we have and just conform to the politaclly correct version so nobody gets their feelings hurt.

Great post. With Cody at the helm great things will happen at Tullahoma. Not only has coach Welsh stayed dedicated to his program for a long time he is also a great role model for young men. You cant find a nicer guy anywhere.

Mr Moon, what tournaments are you talking about? All the ones we run in Chattanooga are online with stats and results through track. I dont think Nashville is running through track. The ones we have been to havent used track anyway. They use track to register but transfer the entries over to their own program to run the tournament. Let me know which tournaments you are refering to as its not Tennessee Aau doing this. Each tournament host choses the format they use to run their tournament. In our region we enter the results as they happen and it updates the brackets. It doesnt take any extra time but for someone not familiar with Track it may seem like a daunting task at first. I will address this issue at our spring meeting as we need to all be on the same page across the state. Be patient, we are getting to where we want to be, slowly but surely.

We are going to miss you Bcb. It was a pleasure getting to know you and watching Jack grow up on the wrestling mat all these years. Blake will never forget wrestling on your last Olpher team when he was just a little tyke. He thought that was the big time! Lol . I think since someone called you the Elton John of coacht you are going to have to grace us with an encore every now and then. Congratulations to Jack for an outstanding year and career. Please dont let our large friend that also wears green or the other large friend from the state champions ride that Shetland Pony of yours though if you plan on keeping it for very long.

It's a simple solution. Put the tournament back together but keep separate team scores for public and private. It's a compromise that benefits everyone no matter which side of the fence you are on. Unfortunately this will never happen and in fact at some point in the near future we will have three state championships.

It will be Soddy and Cleveland in a landslide next year. They each have 3-4 kids that will be on top of the podium and numerous other finishers especially if Lopez returns to wrestling next year. Not only do they have many returning medalist and qualifiers but they have many kids waiting in the wings that will be able to step in and make an immediate impact. After those kids come through they have many more kids Rabbit Turner and Josh Bosken are grooming into future champions. I predict Bradley will drop out of the top 10 for a while for the simple reason they do not have the talent coming in they have had in the past but Ben Smith is as good of a coach as there is and he will get them back on track in short time. Other programs that understand it takes a whole system from kids wrestling through middle school to off season club wrestling are starting to gain some ground. Dont be suprised to see Gibbs continue to improve. They have a top notch coach in Pittman who has been working his tail off for years coaching kids from tots through middle school and high school. He is about to see the benefit of his hard work with an exceptional group of 8th graders coming up. Pigeon Forge is another example of a coach going the extra mile with Greg Forman devoting time from the kids ages on up. Pigeon Forge will be near the top for a while do to his efforts. Clarksville looks to have a solid group returning as well. I wouldnt be suprised to see them battling for third next year. Im not sure where all the old Sharpshooter kids have ended up. I know some are at Blackman and some at Riverdale and Eagleville . For a long time the Sharpshooters put out as many if not more quality wrestlers than anyone with Bill kennedy at the helm. With Blackmans quality coaching if they can get a large number of the old Sharpshooters they should be in the top consistently. Then you have up and coming Wilson Central . There is another man in coach Kramer who is putting in extra hours coaching all ages to ensure his team has the foundation it needs. Maryville is also loaded with some very talented Freshmen who will be making some noise very soon. All of these teams will be consistently in the top 10 for a long while due to their efforts and going above and beyond.

Will you be keeping team points?

My message was confusing. Sorry about that. I may have spoken out of turn. I will check the rules as we may have voted to not allow bump ups in the top 100 tournaments since the participation numbers are so large and the time needed to change brackets and re-number all bouts. In our regualar weekend tournaments we do allow bracket changes. I will verify this and post the policy as well as get the flier changed if needed. Thanks for the input.

Im not sure how long you have been out of wrestling at the middle school or youth level but things have dramatically changed in Tennessee in the last few years. I do agree we shouldnt turn kids away if they dont make weight and in fact I think that in our current rules this is not allowed. There should be a bump up fee for re-doing the brackets. With us using trackwrestling now it only takes a few minutes to make bracket changes after weigh ins. The reasoning behind not allowing weight changes are in good merit though. For years we were criticized for starting late and the reason we started tournaments late was because of all the bracket changes at the last minute. In fact the argument was, "Georgia doesnt allow you to bump up if you dont make weight and they start their tournaments on time". With everyone using trackwrestling or something similiar we now have the ability to make brackets in a matter of minutes now so that problem has been alleviated. As far as Georgia having bigger and better tournaments than Tennessee that is not neccesarily true anymore. This particular tournament in question is part of our Top 100 series which is the equivalent of Georgia's Tour of Georgia tournament series. Points are kept for all of these tournaments and special awards given out at the end of the year. Madison weights do not work in a series type tournament where points are accumulated throughout the year. In the old days Georgia had a few big tournaments each weekend and their tournaments were very large in numbers due to the fact that there are more kids wrestling in Georgia whithin and hours drive of Atlanta than our entire state of Tennessee has. Its only natural that a state with that much population centered in one area is going to have more wrestlers than a state with a much smaller population spread out over 500 miles. Georgia is now attempting to spread their tournaments out a little more to other parts of the state and their numbers arent what they used to be. With most of Tennessee now wrestling under the Aau umbrella and the Top 100 tournament series we are now attracting more and more kids to our Tournaments. Our last Top 100 tournament at Soddy daisy had almost 700 kids. Thats very impressive considering much of tennessee's middle school kids cant compete due to tssaa rules. In georgia the majority of their middle school kids can compete in Usa events. Even with these limitations placed on our kids we are still hosting almost as many if not more in some cases kids in our tournaments. Georgias last tour of Georgia tournament had 621 kids, Walton had 750, Parkview had less than 400, and the Tour of Georgia at Heritage had roughly 260 kids. Our top 100 tournaments have this many kids easily which is impressive given the fact that our population is smaller and more spread out geographically. Our state is benifitting by this tremendously. Our youth and middle school state teams are placing around the top 10 in the country now at the national dual meet tournaments with placements as high as 7th in both age groups in recent years. This is competing with states such as Pa, Ia, Oh, Mi, Mo, Ne, Il, In,Va, Fl , ectt.. We havent caught up to Georgia yet but given our population difference and middle school limitations we have definitley made improvement on a huge scale in the last 5 years. Tennessee youth wrestling is filled with kids who can compete on a national level now and our high school wrestling will see a benefit of this in up-coming years.

Shazzon lost 2-3 times his junior year to Dean Johnson of Chattanooga Central. Two of them were tech falls. Dean lost in the state semi's to Gary King who Shazonn beat in the finals

If my memory serves me correctly there were several wrestlers in the late 80's early 90's with over 60 wins. I think Dennis Dobbs from Soddy daisy had 65-67 wins in 1989. Ill see if I can find out.

Congratulations Don! There is not a more deserving official out there. Its been a great pleasure working with you these past years on behalf of the Aau. You are a great reprensentative of what our sport is all about.

There were only 5 matches per team possible. Your 3 pool matches and then the semis and finals if you made it. The non pool winners just wrestled a crossover match to get 4 matches in. Collins Hill defeated a scrappy Baylor team still misding quite a few starters 43-30 in one semi. Brandon beat Soddy in the other semi, not sure what that score ended up being.

My prediction is 32-26 Soddy

Good luck to S Pitt from a Baylor fan. Bring back that championship to Chattanooga

Correction: I believe there were some wrestlers who placed in the earlier years of the tournament. David Mang was second and Ryan Konz 5th in 2007 along with a few upper weight guys a well. Zachs placing is the first in the last few years since the tournament has grown to the event it is today.

Way to go Zach ! If Im not mistaken Zach is the first Tn wrestler to place in the super 32 in one of the weight classes below 189 or so.

It all depends on your terminology. A cut block (blocking below the waist) is perfectly legal in the free blocking zone. A chop block is technically when a defensive player is engaged with a blocker and another blocker then hits him low and this is illegal.

yep, clear as mud. Im with you on that one.

Yes, very confusing. I dont think ghost explained to the tssaa clearly or they didnt understand. The largest number of middle school teams in Tn are now Aau teams. There are only a few areas that participate through the tmssaa due to their restrictions. These are school teams, they just dont affiliate with the tmssaa. Just because they are an Aau club doesnt mean they have kids from all over. Most still wrestle as their school. You do have a few that are more club oriented and not entirley comprised of wrestlers from one school. I would call the Tmssaa back and ask them the following questions verbatim. I personally know of at least 5 kids that have been suspended for matches due to not following their guidelines. 1) Can tmssaa schools compete against other schools that arent in the tmssaa? If they can as you stated in your previous message then why cant they compete against aau middle school teams? They are just sanctioning through Aau for insurance purposes and so their kids can wrestle in all the tournaments. But they are still representing their school. 2) Can tmssaa wrestlers compete in individual tournaments not sanctioned by the tmssaa during the school season ? If they say no, ask them if they are aware that the majority of schools arent wrestling through the tmssaa for this very reason. Ask them why the tmssaa doesnt provide regional and state tournaments for these wrestlers wanting to compete but yet punish them when they try to better themselves and keep up with the other 70% of the state. Ghost, I think its a mot point unless your middle school is a member of the tmssaa. Most of the school sthat will come will not be tmssaa schools. If you do have some tmssaa schools wanting to come you just hold your tournament prior to their first official match of the year and you are fine. the tmssaa doesnt start here in Chattanooga until the last week of January.