Jeff is right! Rick and Gary should have joined him! With all of the budget cuts being handed out we are going to have to get serious and in a hurry to save money or we might not be able to save wrestling in all of the schools. In 5A and 6A there should be two 16 team regionals and state should only be 8 wrestlers. That is 25% just like 4A. If you did that and have state be from Thursday morning to Saturday night you could make it happen. One building would be cheaper than three! The event would be huge and cities would have to bid to host.
Will, the only aspect of your suggestion that I do not see flying is that 5A and 6A only have 8 qualifiers going to state while 4A and 3-2-1A would still have 16. I understand what you are saying about it being the same percentage as 4A but it just would never be accepted that kids from bigger schools should only have 2 spots at their weight class to qualify for state from their regional while kids from smaller schools would have four spots. I would be stunned if the bigger schools ever allowed that to happen and I don't think they should.
What I would suggest instead to make it more fair percentage wise would be to make 6A, 5A and 4A all 48 teams. I think to make it happen you would have to move up 16 teams from 3-2-1A to 4A, 16 5A teams would move up to 6A and 32 current 4A teams would move up to 5A. This would mean that you would have four 12 team regionals instead of the current 8 in 6A, 5A, and 16 teams in 4A. I am not sure of the current number of teams in 3-2-1A so I do not know what effect it would have on that class to lose 16 teams. This should help make sure that you have at least 8 wrestlers at each weight class at regionals and improve the competition level. If you incorporated the Montana idea of allowing two wrestlers per school in each weight class it would make it even more competitive to earn one of the four state spots.
Having all four classes at one state tournament site seems to be an idea that most of the wrestling community likes. Personally I would not be crazy about a marathon three day event. I actually preferred the 5A one class tournament that we had in Hutchison last year. Like Scooby mentioned there is only one class that I focus on anyway and I thought it was better for viewing the matches that I wanted to focus on. It seems like I am in the minority with this opinion.
