durdon

Just got back from Dixie and there were 115 wrestlers from TN which was a record number of kids from our state. Since our high school boys can't participate and some of our Middle School boys are tied up with their teams or prohibited by their conferences from competing in National Tourneys this amount of kids is pretty amazing and bodes well for future of Tn wrestling. More importantly for the future was that this was that according to Ga people I talked to by far the best showing ever for the Tennessee kids. We had 4 1st place finishes, 11 2nd placers, 7 3rd placers, 6 4th placers, 9 5th placers, and 4 6th placers. Overall it was a really impressive showing by our kids and points to a bright future for TN Wrestling...

Track really is amazing.. Goto big national tourneys or to states to have used track for a while and you will see how much faster and smoother tournaments run with people that are used to using track. If the event is live streamed, and the match is running live on track it is incredably enjoyable. The main issue with track is that it's not user friendly and it takes people running a tournament a few times before they figure it out but once they do it really speeds up events..

If you are still looking Hardin Valley contacted me this past weekend looking for a 2nd assistant coach. It is a paid position too. Call Dan Matlack at 865-567-8484 or email him at mocsfandan@gmail.com

http://highercallingwrestling.org/hcwc/event/mastercraft-preseason-duals/ HCWC - Higher Callings Wrestling Club - is hosting the Mastercraft Melee - Youth and Middle School Duals this Saturday Sept 28th at the Jones Wrestling Center at Cleveland High School. If you are in the area and you want to see the next generation of high school stars come to the Jones Center this Saturday. This is our first regional dual tournament ever and we have been overwhelmed by the talent that is coming to Jones Center. We have 4 teams committed to coming this Saturday. HCWC has our club team, Team Nashville has put together a team of best kids in Middle and West Tn. Warrior Wrestling out of Birmingham is bringing pretty much the entire Team Alabama and we have Grindhouse team out of Georgia with most of the best kids in Georgia. We hope that you will come out and help us support this event. HCWC is trying to promote the level of youth and Middle school wrestling in this state and this Dual tournament is step in that direction. Please stop by this Saturday and check out the action.... Clicking on the link above to our website for the Flyer and list of all of the Kids that are Wrestling this Saturday. scott

I can fully appreciate that and I figured that was the rational as to why some tournaments hide their registration and also the matrix. I do question whether or not hiding the matrix will increase registration, I personally don't think that it does because for every kid that you gained because they were unsure of who or how many were going to be in their weight class, I am betting you lost 1.5 in kids who ended up not signing up thinking it wasn't going to be a quality bracket for them especially kids that were traveling long distances. I am going through the same thought process with the East Coast nationals this weekend. Im am still on the fence because I am not sure if they are going to have a good turnout or not and it a really long drive for me for my son to have a 3 man bracket... Now, I am sure if I ever ran a large tournament I am sure I would get extremely apprehensive the week of a tournament if my registration was light and I would probably end up hiding the matrix myself so I don't blame you at all. But there is no way to really test if showing the registration and matrix increases or decreases registration as there are so many other factors that effect a tournaments total registration each week so I guess we will never really know but my gut feeling is that it that it actually hurts registration. Now as for changing human behavior and getting wrestling parents not to wait till the last hour to register, nothing you do is ever going to change that..... BTW.... really great job this weekend.. The spring nationals was the best run tournament of the year in my opinion. You guys did a great job... awesome tournament.....

Agreed, I skipped the Dixie Youth dual for the same reason... and I am on the fence about the East Coast Nationals for the same reason. I can see if you don't want to release the names even though I don't agree with it but not releasing at least releasing the matrix hurts turnout the late in the year, especially for kids who usually have small brackets to begin with...

This was also my 5th year in TNAAU wrestling and I have to say that I am incredibly impressed by what a great job TNAAU has done over the past 5 years growing the sport during that time and I say this from the perspective of a dad with an average wrestler who has had very little interaction with the people that run TNAAU or any of the main influencers in the sport. As far as this particular state tournament, here are my thoughts: THE VENUE: The good thing about this venue was that it is large enough to hold this size event, which wasn’t the case with the venue last year. There was plenty of parking, easy to get to and centrally located for the vast majority of wrestlers in TNAAU. If it wasn’t for 2 factors I would say lock this venue up for the next 5 years for the state tournament. Those issues being the fact there were no stands on the back side of the arena and the 3rd row of mats were way to far away to see from the stands. The second issue was the dust. I am up at 4:30am because my eyes are killing me 2 days later and I still taste dust in my mouth. The biggest advantage of this venue was that it kept the parents off the floor, which I am sure led to a lot of complaints but at event this size when it means this much to the kids and parents, it really is best if we can keep the parents off the floor which this venue allowed you do. If this venue is chosen again next year there is enough room to run 7 mats across the front row and 7 across the 2nd row and then eliminate the entire back row. That will fix the distance issue from the stands In many ways this was the perfect venue for event this sized other than 2 major negatives. Personally, my vote would be to find another comparable venue but that is just because the dust really bothered me. Oh on the volume, the speakers weren’t to loud in the venue at all, the problem was that the one set of speakers near mat 1 were way to close to the stands and they blasted those 3 sections of stands way to loud. If that speaker stand had been moved back to the 2nd row of mats then the volume for the people in the stands in those sections would have been perfect. The Matches: You guys did a really good job running this meet considering that this was by far the largest tournament that you have put together. BUT and this is a big but Both session were WAY to long. Now that you have experience running a tournament of this size I am sure you will be able to cut down on the length of the 2 sessions next year but I really think that the format needs to change to speed things up. Combining Juniors and Middle School together is a mistake as those are the 2 longest sessions. My suggestion would be run each age group as its own session. The vast majority of parents and I would say over 85% are there for one child. If we can get that kid in and out of the parking lot with medals and t-shirt in 3 hours then that will dramatically lesson the shear amount of people in the venue at one time and allow the parents of kids that are actually wrestling to get the plum seats. If we can achieve a sub 3 hour time span for a kids involvement in wrestling tourney then we are going to start attracting more Grandparents and other relatives to wrestling tourneys which means more money that can be generated at the tourneys and more involvement by the families so our return rate on kids coming back to the sport next year will be higher… The Officiating: I am sure my coach disagrees but I really thought that the officiating was spectacular this year. Very professional and very well managed. The officiating in the Nashville, and Chattanooga area to me is as good as you are going to find in the sport now. The Seeding: I posted some ideas I had about seeding before the tourney but I have to say in the 15 or so brackets that I follow including my own son’s bracket you guys did an incredible job. Every bracket that I looked at was fair and balanced. No matter the format that you chose to go with next year on how to seed whether it award points for the top 100 & region or use Track, the bottom-line is that now that we are getting depth in our brackets in TN that every year if we want to balance out the brackets then it is going to come down to an actual seeding committee as you guys found out Friday night. Next year I would suggest that you do the seeding the Sunday after regions and not wait until late Friday night. Mostly because the way Ga does it and they release their brackets a week to 2 weeks in advance is just darn cool and really builds a ton of excitement. Who cares if the kid ends up not signing up or not making weight. The only kids that aren’t going to show are going to be kids at the bottom of the seeding chart and those forfeits are going to matter, and really how many kids aren’t going to make weight… Even with waiting till after weigh in’s to do the brackets we still had a number of forfeits Saturday so waiting to bracket didn’t help at all. AWARDS: The people in the room handing out medals did a great job and worked very hard the entire day. The room itself was just too small to handle the volume of people that wanted to see the kids on the medal stand and it was hard to get pictures of the boys. If this venue is chosen again next year then another area need to be chosen for the awards area that has more room. Maybe on the floor in back corner facing the stands so that parents could get pictures from the stands. I don’t know that I ever been to a tourney even the major national ones were the awards ceremony has been really that great, so if you have to keep it in that small room so be it. Championship Matches: It was great in theory but Yeah it really didn’t work out so well. Making all of the kids wait until all the matches were done and then doing them all at once was just lame. The wait was to long and then their wasn’t that much excitement because you ran them all at once. I really like the idea of just moving the Championship match to the center match and running it there with an announcer calling the entire match. I missed about half of the finals I wanted to see and this would have allowed me to see them all. True 2nd: Has to happen next year. You were ready to implement it this year logistically but if you run it at all of the top 100 then I think that next you we will be able to run it at state without issue. MAT SIDE CLOCKS No matter what the expense is you have to buy the large stand up Mat side clocks. It really really hurt the tournament not having them. Now that the state is hosting tournaments of this size there are an absolute must.

The problem with duel tourneys is that most facilities are large enough to hold the number of mats needed to host a combined tourney. What happened this year is there was a lot of beginner tourneys in the east tn area so most clubs ended up sending splitting their resources to send beginner there and advanced kids elsewhere...

Chuck I agree with almost all of your points... I skipped liberty this year because we had a top 100 and my youngest wanted the forth piece of the state medal. There should be some thought by the TNAAU as to when the top 100 tourneys are held next year so they don't conflict with national tourneys... As far as seedlings go head to head should be part of the criteria but it seems like nobody in Tnaau wants to do the actual seeding so they have developed this auto seeding system based off region placings.. I was just trying to find an easy way to auto seed the brackets I do agree any seeding should use head to head criteria.. But I still disagree with you and josh that we should use last years placings as part of the criteria. I just think each season should stand on its own..

Shaner - your example of bantam 45 has 2 Chattanooga kids that finished in the top 4 at the union county top 100. Lewis who actually the only time he lost to Shelley was at the region 3 tourney is going to get screwed by the state seeding even though he probably the number 2 or 3 best wrestler in that weight class and he wrestled in 3 of the 4 top 100 tourneys. I just went through the brackets and took 15 minutes and manually did the seedlings which would be a nightmare at state to do all the brackets... I also ran the points off the top 100 and it matched my manual seedlings... I am assuming your kid is in the bracket so you know these kids well so tell me what u think about this seeding and if its fair... 1 seeds 1. Napier 2. Lewis 3. Shelley 4. Smith 2 seeds 1. Csala 2. Gobbell 3. Pope 4. Stahley As it stands right now Lewis and Shelley will be split and there is an 82% chance that one of the will be on the same side with Napier and smith... So 3 of the 4 top seeds are probably going to end up on the same side and one of them will more than likely get locked out of the 3/4 match.... All because 2 of them come out of the same region....

Honestly I actually like USA better than AAU as an organization but in our state AAU is the dominate youth wrestling organization and it is incredibly well run and getting stronger every year.... I think we all need to get behind AAU and help make it stronger in this state.... In South Carolina they are trying to merge 3 different state organizations into 1 with USA, AAU and Nuway all 3 having strong groups in different parts of the state.... And it's a total mess.. We don't want that here... I would like to see AAU start having beginners tourneys on Sundays much like USA does down in GA....

Josh I totally agree.....and actually I think we need to goto 5 tourneys next year and one for each region.... It really stunk that Nashville didnt have one this year....cause it would have been huge...I think we need on in dec, 2 in jan and 2 in feb - that leaves plenty of weekends for local tourneys....(either that or merge region 1 and 2 into 1 region but that's a topic for another thread)

Yes this system will reward kids who wrestle in our state at our TNAAU top tournaments and punish those who don't........If we want to build wrestling in our state we need incentivize our best wrestlers to wrestle at our tournaments... It's the only way that we are going to build depth across the state is if our kids can compete against the best of the best... Other than the region tournament we wouldn't be requiring kids to go to top 100 tourneys but it would effect their state seedlings so that's a choice that the elite level kids would need to make... This year the only choice would have liberty or region 2 tourney... As there really was any big national tourneys the weekend of the other top 100's.... As thruthsquad said sone of the top 100 tourneys were sparsely attended especially the Memphis one and had state seedlings been impacted I would suspect we would have had at least another 100 maybe 150 kids show up. How much better would it have made that tourney... Right now because there is now so many kids in Nashville and so many tourneys in that area many of those kids their aren't traveling at all anymore much like the majority of Chattanooga kids which long term is going to effect the quality of wrestling in the state if we don't try to promote kids to travel...tying state seeding to top 100 will get those kids to travel... Plus if we are able to get our elite kids to all of our top 100 tourneys then it will start attracting more elite level kids from out of state to attend those meets which will make them stronger tourneys and help wrestling even more in this state....

Josh.... I knew u would want points for last year:). Sorry I just think each season should stand on its own....and this system would have hurt Spike since he was sick and missed so much of this season... Sac..... Ga had a Liberty exemption this year because it was the same weekend as their region and they had a 20 top kids going. That was the only reason liberty was part of their criteria this year. Most people will tell you that one of the big problems that GA has is that their top kids aren't wrestling enough in GA tourneys.... Right now our TN elite level youth wrestlers are finally competing at national level. The quantity isn't great but the quality of our top kids very respectable nationally now... As a wrestling organization we should be encouraging our kids to wrestle more in our state because that will make the rest of our kids better and improve the quantity down the road which will improve high school wrestling in our state which really should be our ultimate goal. Thruthsquad.... I really shouldn't have used my son's bracket as an example because that isn't really why I was suggesting this point system... But your counter point that its a cruel world and sometimes you get screwed really doesn't make a lot of sense to me at all... all I am suggesting is that we implement a system that will base seeding at the state based the results at the top 100 tournaments to increase the attendance at those tournaments and to get our elite kids to attend those tourneys... I also think that the region tournaments should actually matter and weigh heavily on the state seeding which is why I doubled the points for the region tourney... Now your argument that "hey that's the way it happens in high school in TN" really holds no barring on this because I think we can all agree that high school wrestling system in our state is far from perfect and very flawed.... Now it seems that you have a biased against the Chattanooga area but I wasn't just referring to our region, there is plenty of brackets where region 5 has a couple of kids that are in the top 4 in their bracket and few brackets where regions 4 and 1 do also. I can even think of 1 that region 2 has 2 top kids too... Our goal with the state tournament should be to ensure that every kid has a legitimate chance to earn the spot that they deserve.. Like it our not how a bracket is seeded has a measurable statistical impact on where kids end up placing... Yes, if we allow for true second then seeding really won't impact the top 3 kids as in almost all of our brackets as they measurably better than rest of kids in their bracket but this year for the first time I'm seeing brackets that are 5,6,7 even 8 deep where there's a chance anyone of those kids could place in the top 4.... And even brackets where top 3 finish correctly should we also make sure that kids that should finish 4,5 and 6 get a chance to earn those spots and don't get locked out cause they got stuck on wrong side of the bracket. As the depth improves in this state the seeding of the brackets is really going to matter... I think that our goal should be after the state is over that when we look at every bracket that the kids that deserved to place were able to earn it on the mat. I don't think that any of us want to see kid end up out of the metals who can easily pin the kids who finished 4,5 or 6th because of the way the bracket was randomly drawn...

Ok josh I'm not following your logic here, in this same thread you said u wanted to not tie in the belt to the state tourney to make the top 100 tournament bigger and stronger and now you are saying that you hate the top 100 because it kills the local tournaments.... You can't have it both ways.... I don't see how encouraging more out of state wrestlers into our top 100 tournaments helps wrestling in Tn... There are plenty of national tourneys out there and us having one in memphis isn't going to help build wrestling in that area or the state...much like having the Spring nationals in tri- cities hasn't helped that area develop its local level of competition. I do disagree with you josh on the top 100 tourneys. I think we tie them into the state even more and lock our best kids into wrestling in state more often and we do everything we can to build up those tourneys.

Just wanted to throw this idea out there as we were talking about it at practice tonight... We realize how impossible it would be to seed every bracket at state by hand and that using track to do the seeding would be flawed... But the current plan of seeding based off region placing is also unbelievably flawed because it punishes kids who come out of the tougher regions in their particular bracket.. I challenge anyone to find me a bracket this year where at least 2 if not 3 of top 5 kids in a bracket aren't coming out of the same region. Those kids are being punished in there seeding just because the best kid bracket happens to be in there region. My idea on how to quickly and easily seed is to award points based off the placing at each top 100 tournament so that 4th place is 1 point, 3rd is 2 points, 2nd is 3 points, and 1st is four points then double the points for the region tournament because its the quaifier for the state so it should count more. We ran it on about 6 brackets tonight and it really seems to work. A kid who travels to all top 100 tournaments and finishes 2nd in all of them then finishes 2nd at region to that same kid would be the overall number 2 seed and not the 6th seed which is the way it should be. Track will actually calculate the points and spit out the seedlings of all the kids and their points, so the brackets would be a breeze to generate and they would be fair. I look at my sons bracket and he finished 2nd in Chattanooga region to a kid that has lost 1 match all year and as things stand when the brackets are drawn he will get a lower seed than kid out of Knoxville who started wrestling 3 weeks ago and had no one else in his bracket. Under this system he would actually be the overall number 3 seed based on the fact he placed at all the top 100 tourneys and 2nd at our region. The 3rd placer out of Chatt would also be the 5 seed then the kids out of knoxville and region 4 that won their region would still be 6 and 7 th seeds even though they have just a couple of wins this year between them combined which honestly is where they should be. No record to speak of but they won their region so they get a decent seeding. This system will not only balance out the inequtites in the regions but it will also reward the behavior that we want in getting our best wrestlers to show up at every top 100 tournament. Ga changed their seedings for state this year to give more weight to in state matches in an effort to get their best wrestlers from traveling out of state so mich. Think about how much higher attendance would be for all the top 100 tourneys next year if placing in those tourneys will effect seeding at state. This will help make wrestling in our state even stronger if our best kids aretraveling to and showing at all of our top 100 tourneys. The points could be tracked on the team Tennesse website and will generate more interest for top 100 and also the state tourney. Plus this system rewards kids for the work they put in the entire season and not just 1 tournament before state. And sorry josh I don't think we should award points for last years results or state placings. Try this point system out on your bracket and tell me what you think...