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Faulkens view on Class Wrestling


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Just now, Y2CJ41 said:

There was 1 small school champion, Hayden Filipovich.

 

No, if you break Indiana into 2 classes then MD falls into 1A enrollment wise. So if we are looking at qualifiers, placers & champs by enrollment then the MD wrestlers have to be included there. Sorry that this doesn't fit your narrative.

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1 minute ago, SIACfan said:

 

You yourself have posted data showing that the of programs have not changed that much over the last what was it 20 years.

 

I have repeatedly stated that I am not against class wrestling. That I agree that class wrestling will give more kids the opportunity at success. That success breeds interest & that could likely result in growth of the sport.

 

I'm sorry that I like the fact that Indiana crowns one champ per weight class. I guess I am just selfish.

I showed three programs that were shut down within the last two years. We have had up to 312 programs at sectional and are down to 306 this year. Program drops will not happen all in one year, but would happen over the course of 10-15 years. 

 

No one really seems to care about Wood Memorial or Blue River Valley not having programs.

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2 minutes ago, SIACfan said:

 

No, if you break Indiana into 2 classes then MD falls into 1A enrollment wise. So if we are looking at qualifiers, placers & champs by enrollment then the MD wrestlers have to be included there. Sorry that this doesn't fit your narrative.

Mater Dei by no means should be classified as a small school. 

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45 minutes ago, Y2CJ41 said:

When you keep stating the statistics should follow the school population you are basically saying that the system is setup to screw the small schools and that you don't care. Telling someone, hey just go to an academy and you'll be better is a nice underhanded comment to say "just work harder" because you obviously are a lazy POS. 

 

The system is broke, we have lost 25% of our athletes over the past 15 years. We have almost doubled the amount of forfeits at sectional. Those are NOT good numbers at all! We are losing wrestling programs and they aren't big school programs. 

 

As I have asked and no one has seemed to answer:
What would it take for you to acknowledge there is a problem and there needs to be MAJOR changes?
1. Losing 25 programs
 

No one will answer this question because their head is buried in the sand saying there are no problems with our system. Trying to claim everything is fine, yet the numbers show differently!

I have asked what programs have we lost?  You mentioned 3 I think - one of which was advertising for a head coach this year, so obviously they are not cutting the program because of participation. Cutting wrestling programs may be the logical conclusion you are getting at, but it doesn't see to actually be happening

 

Also in regards to your first point about "working harder" - if you will never concede that the small school athletes should look at other options to help them reach state, then your solution to add a small school division is roughly equivalent to (yes, I'm going to say it) awarding participation trophies.  Without really showing much proof, you are suggesting that this one step will magically solve all the woes

  • It will not help wrestlers at large schools that are not succeeding (of the 34 4A schools you have listed in your dataset, 8 of them or roughly 25% have had less than 10 state qualifiers total in the past 15 years.  In 3A only 30 out of 34 have had 10 or more)
  • Since small school wrestlers should not have to "work harder" then I guess you are simply going after participation numbers and not skill (I am ok with this, but say that's what it is)
  • You mention the number of participants dropping - that trend has continued during the addition of the TEAM CLASSED state tournament, so apparently the lure of those awards has not improved the participation across the board although it may have helped some schools
  • If participation numbers is the root issue, then let's focus on solving that.  Like Galagore insists - wrestling will die from the bottom up.  Without focusing on the youth programs as step 1 then your solution is only your best guess at what might follow
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9 minutes ago, SIACfan said:

 

You yourself have posted data showing that the number of programs have not changed that much over the last what was it 20 years.

 

I have repeatedly stated that I am not against class wrestling. That I agree that class wrestling will give more kids the opportunity at success. That success breeds interest & that could likely result in growth of the sport.

 

I'm sorry that I like the fact that Indiana crowns one champ per weight class. I guess I am just selfish.

 

Me, too. It is a thrilling environment. My son just asked me the other day, "Dad, do you think I could be a state champion?" and I said (and meant it) yes, and explained to him all of the camps, tournaments, etc. that it would take to make that happen. My son wrestling in this system does not worry me. The decline in participation in Indiana wrestling (while the rest of the nation is growing in wrestling participation) worries me. When you look at what the other states do that we don't do for small schools, there is one that stands out - a classed individual tournament.

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7 minutes ago, Galagore said:

 

Me, too. It is a thrilling environment. My son just asked me the other day, "Dad, do you think I could be a state champion?" and I said (and meant it) yes, and explained to him all of the camps, tournaments, etc. that it would take to make that happen. My son wrestling in this system does not worry me. The decline in participation in Indiana wrestling (while the rest of the nation is growing in wrestling participation) worries me. When you look at what the other states do that we don't do for small schools, there is one that stands out - a classed individual tournament.

 

Galagore I am with you on that. I trust that you understand that.

Edited by SIACfan
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10 minutes ago, Y2CJ41 said:

Mater Dei by no means should be classified as a small school. 

 

I understand that if Indiana were to class this tournament that MD would choose to wrestle in the big class.

 

But, when we are debating whether individuals from large schools have an advantage over individuals from small schools & we are looking at the percentage of qualifiers, placers & champs by enrollment then all small enrollment school qualifiers, placers & champs have to be included in the data set.

 

You can't throw out the outliers in the small school data set (or worse put them in the large school data set) without doing the same for large school data set. Because there are outliers for them to. You are now manipulating the data set to better suit your narrative.

Edited by SIACfan
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12 minutes ago, base said:

I have asked what programs have we lost?  You mentioned 3 I think - one of which was advertising for a head coach this year, so obviously they are not cutting the program because of participation. Cutting wrestling programs may be the logical conclusion you are getting at, but it doesn't see to actually be happening

 

Also in regards to your first point about "working harder" - if you will never concede that the small school athletes should look at other options to help them reach state, then your solution to add a small school division is roughly equivalent to (yes, I'm going to say it) awarding participation trophies.  Without really showing much proof, you are suggesting that this one step will magically solve all the woes

  • It will not help wrestlers at large schools that are not succeeding (of the 34 4A schools you have listed in your dataset, 8 of them or roughly 25% have had less than 10 state qualifiers total in the past 15 years.  In 3A only 30 out of 34 have had 10 or more)
  • Since small school wrestlers should not have to "work harder" then I guess you are simply going after participation numbers and not skill (I am ok with this, but say that's what it is)
  • You mention the number of participants dropping - that trend has continued during the addition of the TEAM CLASSED state tournament, so apparently the lure of those awards has not improved the participation across the board although it may have helped some schools
  • If participation numbers is the root issue, then let's focus on solving that.  Like Galagore insists - wrestling will die from the bottom up.  Without focusing on the youth programs as step 1 then your solution is only your best guess at what might follow

 

What an individual classed tournament gives small schools is a foothold to sell all of that hard work. At our school, we have had two state champions. One was a guy who was 275 pounds and still athlete enough to run the 200m dash on our track team. The other was literally the best athlete in the history of our school. My point is, not people I can walk up to the average kid walking the hallway and say, "hey, just do what he did!" The class wrestling foothold gives us a chance to have more wrestlers of reasonable athletic ability who have put in the work show success, thus making the work more of a selling point. This in turn leads to more success, etc.

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2 minutes ago, SIACfan said:

 

I understand that if Indiana were to class this tournament that MD would choose to wrestle in the big class.

 

But, when we are debating whether individuals from large schools have an advantage over individuals from small schools & we are looking at the percentage of qualifiers, placers & champs by enrollment then all small enrollment school qualifiers, placers & champs have to be included in the data set.

 

You can't throw out the outliers in the small school data set (or worse put them in the large school data set) without doing the same for large school data set. Because there are outliers for them to. You are now manipulating the data set to better suit your narrative.

Yeah...but they have an unfair advantage in that they have an established program and culture that's taken 50+ years to build and maintain. 

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1 minute ago, base said:

I have asked what programs have we lost?  You mentioned 3 I think - one of which was advertising for a head coach this year, so obviously they are not cutting the program because of participation. Cutting wrestling programs may be the logical conclusion you are getting at, but it doesn't see to actually be happening

 

Also in regards to your first point about "working harder" - if you will never concede that the small school athletes should look at other options to help them reach state, then your solution to add a small school division is roughly equivalent to (yes, I'm going to say it) awarding participation trophies.  Without really showing much proof, you are suggesting that this one step will magically solve all the woes

  • It will not help wrestlers at large schools that are not succeeding (of the 34 4A schools you have listed in your dataset, 8 of them or roughly 25% have had less than 10 state qualifiers total in the past 15 years.  In 3A only 30 out of 34 have had 10 or more)
  • Since small school wrestlers should not have to "work harder" then I guess you are simply going after participation numbers and not skill (I am ok with this, but say that's what it is)
  • You mention the number of participants dropping - that trend has continued during the addition of the TEAM CLASSED state tournament, so apparently the lure of those awards has not improved the participation across the board although it may have helped some schools
  • If participation numbers is the root issue, then let's focus on solving that.  Like Galagore insists - wrestling will die from the bottom up.  Without focusing on the youth programs as step 1 then your solution is only your best guess at what might follow

I showed you three programs that did not participate in sectional this year that were around at least the past couple years. As I stated before not everyone is going to do it at once, but it will happen slowly. No one really cares about Blue River Valley, I'm sure most couldn't even name what semi-state they are in. When a school shuts their program down there isn't going to be a big press release like they do in college. They quietly don't schedule events and everyone forgets it existed.

 

We had 500 less wrestlers at sectional than in 2011, that is roughly 35 FULL teams we have lost in VARSITY participation alone. Maybe I'm chicken little, but that indicates a really big problem. Even if you take out the fun COVID year, we were down 400 wrestlers at sectional from 2011-2019 or just over 28 FULL VARSITY line-ups. Again we have lost the equivalent of almost 30 full teams in 8 years. That is not a good trend, if you cannot agree with that then we are in different solar systems.

 

That goes along with losing 25% of the athletes in the sport from 2004-2019. Again, if you don't think that's an issue then we are in different solar systems.

 

No one has ever claimed class wrestling is a magic bullet. We had 6600 athletes in 2019, if you double the amount of placements we would go from 1.6% of the athletes being state placers to 3.2%. Boy that is really handing out participation trophies. 

 

Quote

It will not help wrestlers at large schools that are not succeeding (of the 34 4A schools you have listed in your dataset, 8 of them or roughly 25% have had less than 10 state qualifiers total in the past 15 years.  In 3A only 30 out of 34 have had 10 or more)

False, it will help those bigger schools also. Small schools would see an increase of 79% of their state qualifiers and big schools would see 21% more state qualifiers. Those ones that struggle will send more kids deeper into the state tournament. 

 

Quote

Since small school wrestlers should not have to "work harder" then I guess you are simply going after participation numbers and not skill (I am ok with this, but say that's what it is)

If more kids wrestle, the better off we are. I'm not sure how hard that is to understand.

Quote

You mention the number of participants dropping - that trend has continued during the addition of the TEAM CLASSED state tournament, so apparently the lure of those awards has not improved the participation across the board although it may have helped some schools

Overall the classed team event has helped about 15-20 programs in each class. Classed individual state will affect every team.

 

Quote

If participation numbers is the root issue, then let's focus on solving that.  Like Galagore insists - wrestling will die from the bottom up.  Without focusing on the youth programs as step 1 then your solution is only your best guess at what might follow

Youth programs are not the only magic bullet either. Most schools have some form of a youth program, just look at the ISWA list.

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1 minute ago, Galagore said:

 

What an individual classed tournament gives small schools is a foothold to sell all of that hard work. At our school, we have had two state champions. One was a guy who was 275 pounds and still athlete enough to run the 200m dash on our track team. The other was literally the best athlete in the history of our school. My point is, not people I can walk up to the average kid walking the hallway and say, "hey, just do what he did!" The class wrestling foothold gives us a chance to have more wrestlers of reasonable athletic ability who have put in the work show success, thus making the work more of a selling point. This in turn leads to more success, etc.

I get what you're saying and I think your heart is definitely for the kids.  My point is that the focus on recruiting these kids to wrestle should be at the youth level. Show me a program that has a strong youth program and weak HS program - probably not many.  And the inverse of that is also true (I think)

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10 minutes ago, SIACfan said:

 

I understand that if Indiana were to class this tournament that MD would choose to wrestle in the big class.

 

But, when we are debating whether individuals from large schools have an advantage over individuals from small schools & we are looking at the percentage of qualifiers, placers & champs by enrollment then all small enrollment school qualifiers, placers & champs have to be included in the data set.

 

You can't throw out the outliers in the small school data set (or worse put them in the large school data set) without doing the same for large school data set. Because there are outliers for them to. You are now manipulating the data set to better suit your narrative.

Over the last 11 years Mater Dei has had 84 state qualifiers(2nd) and 44 placers(3rd). The next highest 1A school is Jimtown with 26 and 17, no other 1A school has more than 8 state placers. They are a heavy statistical outlier. 

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2 minutes ago, Y2CJ41 said:

I showed you three programs that did not participate in sectional this year that were around at least the past couple years. As I stated before not everyone is going to do it at once, but it will happen slowly. No one really cares about Blue River Valley, I'm sure most couldn't even name what semi-state they are in. When a school shuts their program down there isn't going to be a big press release like they do in college. They quietly don't schedule events and everyone forgets it existed.

 

We had 500 less wrestlers at sectional than in 2011, that is roughly 35 FULL teams we have lost in VARSITY participation alone. Maybe I'm chicken little, but that indicates a really big problem. Even if you take out the fun COVID year, we were down 400 wrestlers at sectional from 2011-2019 or just over 28 FULL VARSITY line-ups. Again we have lost the equivalent of almost 30 full teams in 8 years. That is not a good trend, if you cannot agree with that then we are in different solar systems.

 

That goes along with losing 25% of the athletes in the sport from 2004-2019. Again, if you don't think that's an issue then we are in different solar systems.

 

No one has ever claimed class wrestling is a magic bullet. We had 6600 athletes in 2019, if you double the amount of placements we would go from 1.6% of the athletes being state placers to 3.2%. Boy that is really handing out participation trophies. 

 

False, it will help those bigger schools also. Small schools would see an increase of 79% of their state qualifiers and big schools would see 21% more state qualifiers. Those ones that struggle will send more kids deeper into the state tournament. 

 

If more kids wrestle, the better off we are. I'm not sure how hard that is to understand.

Overall the classed team event has helped about 15-20 programs in each class. Classed individual state will affect every team.

 

Youth programs are not the only magic bullet either. Most schools have some form of a youth program, just look at the ISWA list.

I looked up Blue River Valley - their AD is the former wrestling coach. Are we sure they have permanently cut the program?

 

I completely agree that participation increase is a benefit - I don't think classing individual HS tournament is the magic bullet

 

I also don't think youth is the only magic bullet - but I do think it is one that is in our current control, where HS class wrestling is likely not.  I favor focusing on something where action can be taken NOW

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1 minute ago, base said:

I looked up Blue River Valley - their AD is the former wrestling coach. Are we sure they have permanently cut the program?

 

I completely agree that participation increase is a benefit - I don't think classing individual HS tournament is the magic bullet

 

I also don't think youth is the only magic bullet - but I do think it is one that is in our current control, where HS class wrestling is likely not.  I favor focusing on something where action can be taken NOW

Blue River Valley didn't field a team at sectional the past two years and only had 4 wrestlers in 2018. I certainly hope the program is not done, however it doesn't look promising.

 

No one here has ever said classing is a magic bullet, even Galgore has stated so a couple times on this thread alone. It will help though. Sometimes you need a sort of artificial shot in the arm to boost the participation. We are coming to a point where we will need to do something soon. As stated in the quoted text, we have lost almost 30 teams in the past 7 years just in forfeits alone. 

 

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13 minutes ago, Y2CJ41 said:

Over the last 11 years Mater Dei has had 84 state qualifiers(2nd) and 44 placers(3rd). The next highest 1A school is Jimtown with 26 and 17, no other 1A school has more than 8 state placers. They are a heavy statistical outlier. 

 

But there are outliers in the large schools as well. If you are going to throw out the best small school then you should at least also throw out the best large school & adjust all the percentages accordingly. By that I mean you have to adjust the total amount of qualifiers, placers & champs by the number that has been throw out.

 

But I guessing you simply threw the MD numbers into the large school data set. Is this what happened?

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1 minute ago, SIACfan said:

 

But there are outliers in the large schools as well. If you are going to throw out the best small school then you should at least also throw out the best large school & adjust all the percentages accordingly. By that I mean you have to adjust the total amount of qualifiers, placers & champs by the number that has been throw out.

 

But I guessing you simply threw the MD numbers into the large school data set. Is this what happened?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18PWUXrlIjvzl_-I-HaflCB2w-r0a_sTkH-WWOcFKl2g/edit?usp=sharing

 

Check the link again, going to the far right for outliers removed. I removed the top 5 and bottom 5 schools in both classes based on number of state qualifiers. 

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Just now, Y2CJ41 said:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18PWUXrlIjvzl_-I-HaflCB2w-r0a_sTkH-WWOcFKl2g/edit?usp=sharing

 

Check the link again, going to the far right for outliers removed. I removed the top 5 and bottom 5 schools in both classes based on number of state qualifiers. 

I get an error when I click the link, so I have only gone by what you have posted here.

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I don’t doubt there are a few good examples of programs that fell apart due to struggles of recruiting, which is the basis of the argument.  Knowing some of the background would be good before using it as an example of just a failure of recruiting.

 

We could talk about budget management or AD’s coach hiring not helping the program future. But even if we leave those out I think for a few of these program it could be wishful thinking of a AD/principal when a kid’s dad or uncle suggest a  small program could be started with some small costs and he will be the coach.  It starts with one kid or a small group of kids who previously participated in another towns youth program want to play the sport in HS.  AD/Principal sees no harm in it and believes it give some none basketball kids an opportunity.  They get small practice space and a small mat in the building or in a few instances practice off campus.  A few other kids get recruited for practice partners.  But in many cases once that original group graduates and dad/uncle coach moves on, the program stalls and the AD never planned ahead  If the principal doesn’t hire a coach within the next year there won’t even be prior experience wrestler around to ask about getting the program going again. It’s a sad end, but those programs weren’t really started with a clear plan for the future in mind.  I’d put the ending of those programs more on the relative coach and the AD/principal. When the whole premise for stating a program is to just support a couple kids, you probably won’t have a program past that group graduating and the relative coach leaving with them. 
 

By the way this example is not even from wrestling it’s from seeing three sports programs, two individual and one team start and die at different 1A schools near me (one I taught at) within a 5 year period of time.

Edited by MattM
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1 hour ago, Y2CJ41 said:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18PWUXrlIjvzl_-I-HaflCB2w-r0a_sTkH-WWOcFKl2g/edit?usp=sharing

 

Check the link again, going to the far right for outliers removed. I removed the top 5 and bottom 5 schools in both classes based on number of state qualifiers. 

 

OK, I know got the link open.

 

So in the raw numbers where do you have MD's numbers?

Edited by SIACfan
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I have read every post here and I have concluded that despite classing the team state tourney and giving more awards to more teams, the total number of wrestling teams in the state have decreased. 
 

Using what we have learned from this, some would like to class the individual tourney and (at minimum of going to 2 classes) double the number of champions and placers, feeling pretty confident this would increase the number of wrestlers in the state.  Despite the fact we haven’t seen this to be true. 
 

Any proposal to actually improve the skill level of any wrestler (feeder programs, clubs, wrestling outside of the high school program, etc) are not fair and generally speaking too difficult or impossible to do.  
 

Wrestlers only wrestle because they like ribbons and shiny things and standing on uneven pedestals. 
 

Maybe the fact that none of this makes sense is why the last 3 pages of this post are the same as the first 3 pages (and my guess is the same as the last 20 threads discussing this).

 

And for the love of God can someone give Y2C a random number between 25 and 100. And stop calling small school wrestlers lazy. 

Edited by TakeTheShot
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https://cbs4indy.com/instagram/data-shows-participation-in-some-hoosier-sports-is-declining/amp/
 

This is over 1 year old, but less kids are playing sports. Over 13 years, football down 7%, wresting down 14%, and basketball down 24%. 
 

45% of kids used to participate in sports. Down to 38%. 
 

From another website...about 6000 less boys in sports over past 10 years. About 10% decline. 

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So if it is agreed the numbers are down, and that extra curricular activities are beneficial, then why is it getting a negative reaction from some people to explore options to try to encourage growth in the sport.  We have the opportunity to try something different to build positivity in the sport.  If 6k less students are participating, then why WOULDN'T we as a wrestling community try to do our part to bring that up, rather than just shrug and say it is what it is,

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