Thoughts on the current one-division state tournament model

[Gator]

WRESTLING is a numbers game you take the first 14 kids that walk into your wrestling room and that is your team and I will take the next 150 kids to make my team up, the odds are in my favor that I will have more athlete's on my vs yours.


We are at least 200 schools behind the these other sports. Change needs to happen. The question is how?






2010-11 HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETICS PARTICIPATION SURVEY












SPORT


# SCHOOLS

# DIV

# PARTICIPANTS






2011


2009

2011



1. Football (11 players)

1,054

5

104,224

103,921



2. Track & Field


1,095

1

51,689

57,922



3. Soccer


1,243


44,705

47,078



4. Basketball


1,360

5

42,521

43,176



5. Baseball


1,237


42,064

42,977



6. Cross Country


1,094

5

21,766

29,580



7. Wrestling


816

1

27,469

27,833

[Nslick]

Grandpa went to the park and met a man and started to talk about sports. Grandpa told the man that his grandson was state wrestling champ this year at weight class 135lb and also was undefeated. The other man took a step back and screamed at grandpa and said that was a lie because his grandson was state champ this year in the same weight class and was also was undefeated. Grandpa got home and called me and i explain to him about five state champion in each weight class here in are state . Grandpa reply ,but there is only one state ???

How upset is Grandpa going to be when he learns that his grandson's state championship football, baseball, cross-country, and soccer teams are shared with 5 other teams?

[Next Level]

Actually, I do believe wrestling is a numbers game, to a degree. The more kids you have competing for the same weight classes, the better they are going to become. As the quality of work out partners improve, the quality of wrestling improves up and down the line up. All this will effect individual wrestlers. Obviously, some wrestlers will improve at a faster rate than others.
Another point, every school is only going to have a certain amount of athletes, you know the thorough breeds. The larger the school, the more potential athletes that could join the team. Steel sharpens steel, but what happens if one piece of steel weighs 125 and the other 185?
There are always going to be examples of one wrestler schools, but the teams that consistently put a quality wrestler on the mat have the plenty of horses in the stable.
Now I would be remiss, if I did not recognize that this by itself is not the sole indicator of success, since as you said, "we would have champions evenly distributed throughout the state..." There is a reason why Clovis District schools are consistently in the top 10, because of their excellent feeder system. I was able to talk to Dave Crowell, top high school coach out of PA. I liked his stuff, but still wondered how he able to create such great teams. Turns out that 99% of wrestlers enter high school with something like 4 years experience. So not only does he have the bodies, he also has bodies with quality experience.

Ok I would have to agree that the potential for a larger school to have an advantage over a smaller school exists but is the potential advantage so great that we should prevent the schools from competing with each other?

I think a better division would be schools that have a middle school feeder programs should be divided from schools that do not have a feeder program. I think you can prove that an advantage exists.

I am being facetious; I do not believe that there should be any divisions.

[Nslick]

It's more than potential, it's a fact. A vast majority of the kids placing in the top 5 are from schools larger than 1000. Not surprising, the top 5 placing teams come from larger schools*. I just don't know how you don't see that. Look over the data from this century.


*Not including all-boys schools. Since once again they have a larger pool to choose from.

[Next Level]

It's more than potential, it's a fact. A vast majority of the kids placing in the top 5 are from schools larger than 1000. Not surprising, the top 5 placing teams come from larger schools*. I just don't know how you don't see that. Look over the data from this century.


*Not including all-boys schools. Since once again they have a larger pool to choose from.

How many schools in California with wrestling have less than 1000 kids? If we compared the percentage of schools with less than 1000 kids I think that the top 5 placing may be proportional. The reason that the majority of top placers are from schools with more than 1000 kids is because the majority of schools have more than 1000 kids. Can someone help us with the numbers and can we get a numbers guy to correctly figure out the percentage. Pretty please with sugar on it.

[Nslick]

How many schools in California with wrestling have less than 1000 kids? If we compared the percentage of schools with less than 1000 kids I think that the top 5 placing may be proportional. The reason that the majority of top placers are from schools with more than 1000 kids is because the majority of schools have more than 1000 kids. Can someone help us with the numbers and can we get a numbers guy to correctly figure out the percentage. Pretty please with sugar on it.

If ZERO schools with less that 1000 place in the top 5, then the percentage is 0%. Can you figure out proportionality with these numbers?

[cen-cal wrestling]

he is saying that there are only a handful of schools that have less than a 1000 students and also deserve to be a top 5 cali team... they can have their own "state championship" in December or something

[Nslick]

he is saying that there are only a handful of schools that have less than a 1000 students and also deserve to be a top 5 cali team... they can have their own "state championship" in December or something

So you are essentially agreeing there should be a small school division.

My work here is done.

[Next Level]

If ZERO schools with less that 1000 place in the top 5, then the percentage is 0%. Can you figure out proportionality with these numbers?

The number of schools with less than 1000 students with wrestling after you remove the All Boys Schools might only be 5%. You might not have any placers this year but last year you had McIntosh and Knowles. . I'm willing to be wrong I am just guessing, we still need to see the numbers.

[mhicks]

I come from OR, a state with 5 divisions(which IMO is too many). And can tell you our state finals is well attended. We get around 9400 fans in the stands in Portland for our finals.

While yes, our tournaments are a bit watered down, what we make up for is fan excitement. The place is always packed and fans are always screaming. Small towns literally fill the arena, something you probably rarely see at a one class tournament.

What this really benefits are the small town programs. You know as well as I do, it is rare for a school of say 200 kids to have a chance against a school with 2000-4000 kids. In a division tournament, we are able to compete against schools close to our size. It helps our numbers, it brings town pride and gets our kids excited to be a part of our program. We qualified 9 kids this year. We had a parade through town, two school assemblies and tons of recognition. In a one class system, we'd likely get one kid to state and none of that other stuff would've happened. IMO, this is great for our sport.

For example, Burns HS won 10 straight state team titles. Their town literally shut down like a TX football town does for the state and district tournaments. They'd bring hundreds to these tournaments. Burns is out in the middle of nowhere with a school population of about 220. Again, this is how our sport is built.

CA should literally be flooding the nation with wrestlers. With 38 million people and only 27,000 wrestlers to show for it, doesn't seem right. OR had 3.5 million and over 6000 wrestlers. If we had CA's population, we'd have over 60,000 HS wrestlers, if not more. When a college is considering dropping a program, that's hard to argue with.

IMO, and my opinion only, CA could easily split into a large school and small school division, still have two 32 man bracketed tournaments and nothing would be missed.

You are spot on. I wrestled in Oregon when they had three divisions and the state tournaments were wrestled at Gil Collesium on Oregon State's campus. the finals had three mats side by side and the stands were full. What a thrill. Nothing was lost and so many more fans filled the stands cheering for their local stars. But we also had opportunities to wrestle all those other champs later. California could put together some kind of State all Star team that travels to Russia or Japan or somewhere cool. We had to beat all the studs to make the Cultural Exchange team in the summer. I had to beat multiple state champs in a couple different wts on a tense weekend in order to make that trip my senior year and my small school titles didn't make any difference. After that tournament ten champs went to a training campfor a week and then flew to Japan for a three week tour wrestling in the Western Japanese Open and dueling a lot of local high schools in Osaka. My point is there are many opportyniites to get head to heads with those state champs but we are losing something that would be good for wrestling by keeping one division. It takes a month to make it to the final stage now. It would still take a month but 1000s more fans would be pulled along for the ride. In reallity nearly 550 teams didn't have any wrestlers in the state meet. for the majority of schools in Ca. the season was over two weeks prior. On a good year 1-2 kids might qualify in the typical school and those kids have a hard time finding training partners the last week or two. Teams with 8-10 qualifiers don't have that problem. The most powerful wrestling areas in the country in terms of College wrestling are not in California. At the high school level california should have a kid ranked top 3 in the nation in every wt class since we are so big and have so many programs compared to the mid west and Northeast. If three divisions in Ca. were to happen there would need to be venues for the top kids to face off and that can be done in many ways. What would be lost would be minimal compared to the standing room only final with three mats side by side under the spot light at Rabo Bank Arena. Wow! I would never miss that night. Even now the most exciting round for me is usually the semis where 6 mats are going and if one match is boring I'll turn my attention to another. Lets face it, not all the fianls matches are that exciting...we often don't know everyone in the final but three going at once would make for a great show. If you follow wrestling you would most likely know and be rooting for one of those 6 young men. Just my thoughts.