polytropos

Do you think so little of Sims and Welch? That is crazy. It isn't like this is Tsirtsis going up 15 pounds to wrestle an average or even above average wrestler. Roach won state at his own weight by 2 points. Sims is a 4 time placer who lost in the finals by 3 to an undefeated and very good (Big 10 good, apparently) wrestler. I don't know if you are just going by his record, but almost all of those losses were injury defaults. Again, I am not sure Roach's absence really mattered to the outcome. Unfortunately we will never know, but since CP won at 152 anyway the absolute most that he could have added would have been 3 points.

Definitely. Hats off to Shrewsbury. I took a moment to pray for their family after the match. As a MD fan I am thrilled with the outcome, but I was prepared to take comfort in what the win would mean for his family.

With CP having won the 152 match it is unclear that this really had any impact. It certainly would have benefited them to have Roach at 160, but that wasn't a legal option. IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How is it that nobody knows this if the practice is not allowed?

As someone who grew up in the southernmost corner of the state, I can't say that you would want to be on the receiving end of wrath you would face were you to move Mater Dei's team state (whatever class that would be) further north than Indianapolis. Unlike those of you in the north who can get to indy fairly easily, we have no north-south interstate access. So going from the west side of Evansville to Greenwood is already over 3 hours. Move it to Fort Wayne or Lafayette, and I don't think you would want your address getting out. That's a lot of fans, and a lot of anger.

Why would someone desire such a thing? If the problem is the coaches' taking a dive and resting players for the individual tournament, why not address that issue? In a thread earlier in the year one of the posters (stand up and be noticed, whoever you are!) proposed a schedule for the state series that would have moved the team tournament in to the end of the regular season, then doing the individual tournament afterward. This is how it is done in Pennsylvania, and I think it would actually solve the problem. You could even class the team tournament, which I don't particularly support, but would tolerate so as not to kill one of the greatest weekends of wrestling that Indiana has to offer.

I am with XCard on this. While I am disappointed I will not be able to see it (I think the 22 hour round trip would be a bit excessive), I think if those devoted to our beloved sport want to see these great matchups they need to head to Center Grove and support it. This is going to be one helluva good day of wrestling, and everyone within 3 hours drive would do well to head to the gym! Sadly, if it were broadcast, I think it would effect attendance.

There was a thread on here earlier this year where someone posted a proposed new tournament schedule that would have fit the entire team tourney in prior to the individual tourney and it got a lot of support. In fact, that is the way it is done in Pennsylvania, and it seems like people really support both tournaments. I think instead of going backwards and crowning a "team" champion of 3 good wrestlers, we should work toward making this proposal viable and promoting it at the highest levels.

I sincerely mean no disrespect by this, coach, but why would you do this at the exact same time as the Team State wrestling tournament? It seems setting up an alternative wrestling event at the same time will draw people who may have been sitting on the fence away from the tournament, and as most know, the IHSAA is really going to be paying attention to the attendance numbers this year.

Terribly sad. My thoughts and prayers go out to the Shrewsbury family. Hang in there.

I should have put a time limitation on that statement. I will never be surprised in hearing that something was done in the 70's. Those were ... interesting times. But I think this actually supports my point, nonetheless. If boys were allowed to play on the girls team, there would soon be no girls team.

The question was about joining the GIRLS volleyball team, not whether certain schools have started one for boys. I have serious doubts that there is any case of a boy being allowed to participate on a girl's team at the high school level. In fact, I would be shocked if someone could produce an example. Nature has simply decided against it. The only way girls are able to be successful in wrestling is by staying in the lower weights where they can take advantage of the lag in boys' physical development. So you have girls that are muscularly well developed wrestling against boys who are in the early and awkward stages of puberty. This is generally true even if a boy and a girl are the same age -- girls physically develop much faster and stay much lighter. This is why you do not see girls having any success at higher weight classes where both contestants are physically mature, and I would be willing to bet that in the matches that the lighter girls lose their opponent is most often in that extremely small percentage of males who physically mature but remain light (probably because they are short). That said, as others (including myself) have repeated, the issue is not about who wins and loses in inter-sex matches. I don't care if a woman were able to win an NCAA championship, that would not justify the practice.

Maligned-- This actually pertains to another thread, but as I know you will read this I will ask you here. I saw a post of yours once (a long while a go) that required you to calculate all of the historical scores from the individual state tournament, so I am guessing you might know who has won the coaches trophy every year since Team State began. Would you mind to post that if you do know? For some reason historical information on that seems to be harder to find than the presidential nuclear launch codes (not that I found those either, but man if I did...)

Ha! Quote of the day nomination. You know the only way to prevent that is training. You can't stay away during the whole of the offseason and expect to be up to the rigors of a long wrestling season. Maybe take a week off to let things settle, but then get right back on your horse! I think I saw somewhere that the morning after Dan Gable lost his NCAA finals match he was spotted doing shots of Nacho Cheese and chasing them with hot dog drippings. Yeah. He was driven.

Greg Schaefer (IU 1998 - 2003) is head coach at Mater Dei.

In fact it is difficult to say "anti-climaxtic", which is why it isn't a word. Sadly, though, your orthography is better than your reasoning. Sims didn't forfeit all those matches during the season to duck Welch, as certain incorrigibly ignorant Welch fans (and that is not all of you) continue to claim. You just refuse to let your opinion be shaken by the inconvenient facts of the case. So let's walk through this one more time. First, look at Sims's history: he placed in the top six all four years of his high school career -- his freshman year that required the 14 year old John Sims to wrestle the day after the death of his father, who, as you can imagine, was a huge part of his wrestling life. He is not the type of person that shrinks from a challenge, and if you would take a look at the scores from all of the matches between these two, you will see that John had little reason to be afraid of Welch. That claim is ridiculous. Second, Welch was not even involved in most of the matches that Sims missed this year. Look at his record at the start of the tournament and compare it to that of his teammates that were permanent starters: 10 - 2 Sims 27 - 3 Brandenstein 28 - 1 Boots 26 - 4 Lannert So if we say he had the opportunity to wrestle about 30 matches, and he wrestled 12 instead, by your thesis we have to assume that he was slated to wrestle Welch a good 18 times during the regular season. I have heard of rivalries, but that would have been spectacular indeed. I am assuming (though perhaps I shouldn't) that I don't need to list MD's schedule to show that this is not even close to true. So, in the end, we have a young man who is among Indiana's most decorated wrestlers in this year's class, who had shown for 4 years an incredible willingness wrestle in difficult circumstances, yet had missed about 60% of his matches in his final season, and you would have us believe that the most reasonable explanation for his forfeits is the fear of one wrestler he had wrestled competitively in the past. You are out of your mind.

As an MD fan, my outlook is not so optimistic. I hope you are right, but after this weekend I don't see MD taking out CP. The cats are going to have to come up with some HUGE matches. Back in the day I used to see this all the time. Nobody wanted to be the team that blew the streak and lost a dual meet, and certain wrestlers came up with big upsets to continue that. It seems like that instinct has been lacking of late. I guess we will see how much heart this team has, because I think they will have to wrestle over their heads to pull it out. Go MD!

Big weekend for the Evansville Semistate. 7 Champs 4 Seconds 0 Thirds 4 Fourths 3 Fifths 1 Sixth 5 Sevenths 7 Eighths 31 Total Place Finishers That includes 2 weights (140,145) where Evansville placed all 4 wrestlers. Impressive

Easy there, tiger. Read all of the comments. The problem is likely with your ISP, not the stream itself. I can personally testify that the stream is coming through perfectly fine and is of a very high quality.

The video is, it seems, much higher quality than the broadcastsports stream. If you have a slower internet service, it might not be able to process the higher resolution very well.

Not having any problems here. All is great.

Chambers, looks like you posted Sims' lineup for Welch also. Actually Welch had the following: 40-4 Davon Alwine (4th at Merriville Semistate, ranked 19) 43-3 Michael Jurkins (3rd at New Castle semistate, ranked 9) 44-1 Tyler Willis (2nd at New Castle Semistate, ranked 2) So, Sims beat the people that beat Welch's opponents...I am with you, I'm not seeing how Sims' road was easier.

But the point that you seem to blithely sidestep is that they are still, in fact, girls -- even when they put on a headgear and step on a wrestling mat. They still have certain parts and lack others (to overly simplify things). You can't decide that they aren't girls because they decided to join a boy's sport, and if you decide that, you are simply denying reality. That physical fact is incontestable. Play all of the mental games you want, concentrate all you want on their "wrestlerness", repeat that the person across the mat is not a girl 1,000,000 times, and BING... she is still a girl, just a girl who happens to be wrestling. From the moment she is conceived until the moment she dies she will perform countless actions, from eating meals to studying multiplication tables to teaching her children how to read, and during every last one of them she will continue to be a girl -- and should always be treated as such. To treat her as something else would be to disrespect her femininity. The fact that you would have us deny what she is in order for this to work should probably tell you it's not good.

Pretty impressive showing out of Evansville. If Boomsma hadn't gotten caught it would have been even more impressive (I know, if "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts...). By my count, too, they have a shot of winning 8 championships (I am guessing Tsirtsis wins, and obviously only 1 can win at 160).

MUCH easier? Are you serious? His last two opponents were a combined 80-0. Perhaps you were undefeated in high school and so that isn't impressive, but in my book one doesn't go undefeated into the quarterfinals or semifinals of the state tournament without being REALLY good. And your implying that his injury was fictitious or minimal is just insulting -- not just to him, but to everyone with intelligence who reads this board. John Sims is a 4X state placer (an impressive achievement that even Welch did not accomplish). But in this, his final year, he missed more than half of his potential matches. Why would he do that? There's nobody on here bashing Welch, indeed I have nothing but respect for him. Why your classless bashing of a young man who has shown an incredible and highly respectable amount of mental toughness over the past 4 years? He has been dealt an incredibly difficult hand, and has continued to push through -- all the way to the state finals, in fact. Regardless of the outcome of that match, Sims deserves respect.