The post from illegalhold does raise some questions. Can we learn from what some of the other states are doing for their tournaments? I do like the split tournament format. I know it is more demanding on the coaches, table workers, tournament directors, etc. What it does do for the sport is help keep some wrestlers and parents excited about the sport. I think wrestling more than any other sport loses kids to burnout. I think the reason is the time that the sport demands. In KS we wrestle from November-April, then go into Freestyle/Greco Roman through July. For the kids that want to do other sports as well it is difficult for them to justify all the time they spend in wrestling and inturn get burned out. If we somehow made the tournaments better I think it would help. One thing that we do forget through all of this is that the families want to see the kids wrestle too. When the families have to sit for 3-4 hours between matches it starts to wear on them. If you only had a couple of hours to wait around it would be easier for more family members to watch. This should also help the popularity of the sport as well.

I have heard from several parents that have made the trip to Nebraska to wrestle, that they liked the design of their tournaments. I am not saying that is the way to go, but maybe a change for our tournaments is in order. Possibly it is using the split tournament format.