Smithy and whoever else wants to listen to my rant,

Here are the issues that I had. For my tournament I think I had the protocol set pretty well for what was required of the “home sites”. I took the time to send each club an xls spreadsheet with the format that I wanted the weigh in information reported (each of their kids were listed by age/weight). I explained in detail that I wanted the skin/nails checked and for the box to be checked on the weigh in sheet accordingly. I listed the times that I would allow. Numerous clubs didn’t read my protocol or ignored it. I had weights left for me on voicemail, sent via text message, typed into the body of the email….etc. Many of those that didn’t follow the protocol also left some of their kids off the list of kids that they reported weights for….and they didn’t notice the issue until the tournament was bracketed with their wrestlers deleted. We elected to go back in and add the kids…this cost me about 30 minutes and printing of another set of brackets before we could start the tourney.

I have been to other tournaments this year when I heard a kid say….”yeah we weighed in at Thursday night after practice". I witnessed a wrester show up for Saturday morning weigh in where a weight had been reported for him on Friday night….the problem was this kid had no recollection of stepping on a scale on Friday.

As I have stated previously, there is plenty of merit to the remote site weigh in for us to continue to pursue it….but from what I have witnessed this year we are not ready to roll it out for the qualifying series where a controlled protocol is not just a good idea; it’s the only idea that works. In a sport that divides kids by a predetermined weight allowance I would think that the weigh in verification process is a pretty important piece of the puzzle.