I believe the longer you have been in wrestling the more tolerable you find some of these long tournaments. Most of the people on this forum on a regular basis have been involved in wrestling for a long time and I believe are very willing to spend a lot more of their time at tournaments than the average sports fan or 7 to 10 year old wrestler. This is my son's 6th year and I did not wrestle as a youth. My youth experience was with sports that took a lot less time than our typical weekend wrestling meet. It was very difficult our first few years of his wrestling to accept all this time spent at a typical tournament. My guess that is that some families drop out early because of it and especially are more likely to do that if their child is not having initial success. I think there is a strong possibility my family would have dropped out, if my son did not have initial success.

It was stated that it takes about 11 hours to complete the first day if you are the last to leave on your mat. I may be wrong but I just think that is too long for 7 to 10 year old kids to be spending in that arena. I don't think most of them are spending all that time really watching other matches either. At least my son never did at those ages. If even under our current system we were to do a split format which for the sake of argument might add 45 minutes per session than the maximum time for one session would be 6.25 hours instead of 11. Personally, I think that would be plenty of time for my son to experience good wrestling benefits. Also as was stated you would be free to stay and watch the session you were not participating in. What would be wrong with giving people the choice to attend or not attend the session they are not competing in?

Edited: We stayed an extra hour or so at Pittsburg this weekend just to watch my son's practice partner wrestle his championship match but that was our choice. I'm glad we were not forced to stay that extra hour to cheer him on. I bet it meant more to him that we made the choice and were not forced to do so.