We try to make sure that all the kids got the proper rest time, however, (this happens on certain 32 man brackets as well) the backside matches tend to get crowded together if you don't have other brackets on that mat to fill in the spaces. Example, 32 man brackets have 7 rounds of backside matches PLUS the 5 rounds of Championship side matches. When a kid loses on the frontside he then goes to the backside and unfortunately, depending on the location of the bracket in which he crossed to the backside, he may cross from the bottom front side to the top backside which increases his chance of wrestling that backside match sooner due to the way the bouts are numbered. If you don't have a lot of round robins to fill in the gaps between rounds of the 32 man bracket, (and/or you have scratches in other brackets) the kids will seem to have to wrestle back to back matches. Then you have time constraints, where people want to get done (referees) so you try moving matches as other mats become available and that can cause bouts to skip numbers thus decreasing the time between matches for the kids. Like I said before, we tried to make sure that the kids got the proper rest time between matches. However, in the practice room do the kids get 30 minutes of rest between live wrestling with their practice partners...hmmm.

As for mat space, each kid wrestled on at least a half mat, with the bigger kids getting a full circle in the Aux Gym. I guess we could have gone to full circles for everyone, but we would still be wrestling until Christmas and there would be several different complaints to deal with.

Craig Gash
Derby Wrestling Club
Tournament Director