Jason,

I certainly agree with you that there are some officials who probably shouldn't be on the mat. And I say that with a lot of carefulness. As an official I don't think it is my place to put down other officials, cause lord knows there are other officials who wouldn't agree with me. But we are talking about state level officials here. This generally means these guys are some of the best in the state.

Now as far as judegement and power are concerned. Officials in our sport are setup up the way they are for a reason. That reason being that "control" and many other situations are a matter of perception. There is absolutly no other way to call a wrestling match. The only other way is to have 2 or three officials in a match, and as you all know that does not often change the way something is called.

Our system is setup in such a way so that coaches cannot argue every single close call which they would do if we didn't have the warning/ejection system that we do. Not even you WSEWC could argue that. We see it all the time in Kids wrestling, where coaches are up at the table constantly. Now we are more lenient at kids levels for several reasons. 1. Many coaches at that level don't even know the rules, and tossing somebody out of a tournament because of ignorance is kinda bad policy. 2. Touurnament directors hate to see ejections because then the club of the ejected coach won't wanna come back the next year.

Believe it or not WSEWC, the system is setup in such a way that bad officials never get the chance to officiate at upper level events, and the ones that do mess up end up not getting to come back to certain tournaments.

I don't think officials are infallible, and I know im certainly not. I am however confident in 99.5% of my calls. I have waved off 1 takedown all year long this year, I knew I was wrong when I made the call, I walked over to both coaches and explained it, and even the coach of the kid who got the points taken back away thanked me.

The thing that really bothered me about the Kern-Strawn match is how many times I have heard already from people on here that "Well the first 2 periods were non stop actions ..." The thing you all must understand is you don't get brownie points or kudos for things you have already done in the match. The rules say stalling can occur at any time in the match.

We all have times when we think that officials have made bad calls, but i personally don't think a public forum is a place to come on and bash officials. Every year less and less officials are registering for wresltling, and more and more officials who are in are not coming back ( I personally know of 5 just this year ), and the reason I hear the most is they are tired of all the complaining. I think that is very sad and a blackmark on our sport. Keep this up and you'll be hiring high schoolers to officiate your matches.