MOWrestler

Congratulations to Chesterton and Hobart for an amazing performance @ EC SS. Chesterton won the Semi-State Team Title earning 6 spots at Bankers life (all 6 made the finals with 4 Champions)!!! 6/9 for a 67% qualifier rate. Hobart finished 3rd in the team contest with 4/7 advancing and 3/7 in the finals with 2 Champions.  Shout out to Kankakee Valley, Rensselaer Central, and Wawasee for top 10 finishes with less than 6 wrestlers in the game.  Some of the big number schools still did well, notably Portage qualifying 8/14 for Indy.  Crown Point got 4/11 through, Penn 4/12 and Merrillville 3/12.  Harrison WL brought 10 with only 1 moving on.  Any other strong performances by schools who brought less that 10 wrestlers to their respective SS???  #QualityNotQuantity

I had an interesting seat between both Penn fans and Bautista supporters.  Clearly each had different takes on the slam calls.  Penn fans obviously agreed with the calls on the mat, but others seemed to think Demein was basically flopping...making the slam look worse by going limp on the mat return.  Any non-partisan observers have an opinion on this match?

Chesterton wrestled out of this world! They did a fantastic job with all 6 of their guys in the finals with 4 champs! Congrats to the ECC semi-state champs! Thank you for the kind words from the Hobart Staff, we were really proud of the way our guys performed, Our 106 Cardwell lost to the kid that won it, 152 Burns lost a nail biter to Lamore CP, and our 160 Guarnero (Reg champ) was rewarded with a very tough Oskar Kasch CP and wrestled really well against him. Not to mention these boys have been putting in the work in the classroom as well, 4 academic all-staters!

Jimtown took four to semi state and ended with 3 champs and 1 runner up. The team finished second.

Being under the radar is not the worst position to be in.

I agree that there doesn't need to be a topic posted every time a ref gets a call wrong, but where has this idea that "if you don't like the calls, become a ref" come from? If you get a poorly cooked meal, do you have to become a chef before you can criticize it? If somebody does a half-assed job fixing your car, do you have to shrug it off if you aren't a mechanic yourself? Nobody is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, but we don't have to baby the refs every time somebody complains about their call. On the flip side though, we don't have to make threads on a message board about them.

I can't attest for Rumphs performance today nor do I have any inside info. But I did witness Black eat an entire Nacho (extra cheese) from the concession stand prior to the match. Only conclusion I can come up with is those are some damn good nachos that the fine folks at E.C.C are whipping up!

Every parents nightmare. My son just started driving. I can only imagine getting a call like that. My thoughts and prayers will be with this young man, his girlfriend, and their families. Sorry to hear.

I never got the excitement out of this...I guess I'm like Nick's cat, I would rather play with my food before I eat it!

There is a Tykease Baker in the bottom half, two Bakers, but not a Baker's dozen at this weight.

Second that! At least with out breaking something or needing days of ibuprofen and bengay!

Those Davidson brothers are the real deal. Would be AWESOME to see both of them under the lights and having back to back hands raised...... those two can make it happen. Hatch at 152 can beat anyone with his crazy style. I'm saying 6 possible 8

...equivalent to "winning the popular vote".

If I calculated the ratio of state champs to the sum of total enrollment.   Logansport wouldn't do as well in that calculation.

This sounds like commie talk....

Dembowski is tough! Had a great match with Cummings. But that 120 weight class is a GREAT one to be apart of.

That is true, but they have a large number of players to sub-in and out of the game at all time to ensure that one player having a couple errors doesn't eliminate the entire team from the competition.  Same for about any team sport.  Most individual sports multiple people to move on based on best scores (gymnastics), times (swimming/track/cross-country), or round (golf).  Wrestling only issues is we are not able to compete against all other opponents at once, so wrestle-backs are the closest option to competing against the field that we have.  Really most are only asking for wrestle-back to help ensure the random draw doesn't interfere with determining who is actual the best 4 to compete that day.

For me, this is also part of the problem. We're hung up on fighting for wrestlebacks at all levels when semi-state is the obvious one that produces injustices. What you're describing is more a faulty system of designating the alternate. With the seeding system at sectionals and the pairing system at regionals, every wrestler has every chance to prove he or she is good enough to advance. At semi-state, this is not the case. Random pairings across 4 sites produces many injustices to the extent that the genuine best 4 end up in 4 different brackets only about 40% of the time.
 
In your case, we just need different alternate selection criteria. For me it should be this for choosing the semi-state alternate from among the regional first-round losers:
1. highest place from sectional
2. If there's a tie, then the one who lost to the highest regional placer gets the spot
 
It should be that for alternates to state as well:
1. the highest regional placer from among the 4 semi-state quarterfinal losers should be the alternate
2. If there's a tie, give the spot to the individual who lost to the highest semi-state placer.
 
As we have it now, we're almost certain to select a sectional 4th placer every time when higher placers from their own sectional were available.

This is true, but they take it a few steps further with rigidness across all sports: no seeding, random draws, fully geographic, no consideration of school size or quality in distributing teams into sectionals. Because of that, they view wrestling as already being granted lots of favors by guys being able to lose matches for 3 weeks and still go to state and by us being able to do seeding at sectional.
 
My opinion has always been that we have to do a better job of comparing wrestling to track and swimming: you've got everybody together in the same building on the same day--go ahead and run the event as a normally run wrestling event and let the best advance as track and swimming would. Not doing wrestlebacks in an event like semi-state is like doing randomly drawn heats for swimming or track regionals and taking heat winners to state regardless of times even though you had everybody in the same facility and could have pit them against each other to try to find the genuine best group.

Got to get past the first match first

Lemley beat Kasch last weekend. But... everyone always says semi state is down but we go out and still bring back 6+ champions. I see a possible 8 state champions from this semi state again.

Fattore has a tough ticket round against Malone. If he gets through I'd say he has a shot at beating swank