wrestlingmom, the women names is Lisa Woody from District 4, she has been officiating at the state tournament for as long as I can remember, and she is definatly one of the better ones.

As far as the official bashing is concerned its nothing new here so I won't say too much more about that.

The selection of officials for state is a VERY sore spot for me. I won't get into specific details on this site, but there is not really a "system" in place for selecting officials for the kids state tournament. The way its supposed to be done is district directors are supposed to send forms out to each club in their district and the clubs are supposed to pick either 5 or 10 officials they would like to see at the tournament. However I know that at least 2 of the districts this year did not use that procedure. And the other two that probably did were skewed at best.

I cite as an example. There was an official from D4 who doesn't even live in that district, in fact that person lives on the other side of the state, and was selected as one of D4 choices. There was another official from D3 who didn't referee a kids tournament ALL year long, who was at the state tournament. Does anyone else see the problem here? Don't get me wrong these two officials are very good and I have complete faith in them. The problem I see is the kids system should reward those officials who are deserving based on how they performed throughout the year. They should not be picked because of name recognition, being good friends with the directors, or otherwise.

I spoke with Ned Price about this at the District I tournament, and hopefully next year we can get a process started to perhaps let someone from the state tournament commitee or the state board to handle the nomination and selection procedure, because as I see it there are alot of good officials being passed over because of silly politics.