Matt Time

For the past three years, I've had one girl on the team. This year, I had eight in the practice room and six who competed in nearly all the girls tournaments. Two will make it through to the state finals next weekend. Tonight, we had four more girls show up who were simply "curious" and I talked to them about joining next year. As comfortable as they are with me and the other male coaches, our school's ability to get a female adult to join us will be the next step to helping the next batch overcome their hesitancy. What does that have to do with sanctioning? It would give my school the confidence to actually invest in the sport, commit to extra $$ to help cover getting a female adult/teacher involved and various other things like women's singlets, some dedicated space and other basic necessities. Even if IHSAA doesn't choose to sanction, there are a few things that we can do next year as a coaching association and ISWA to help continue building this sport. Getting the list of invitations built early and communicated widely. We need a single place to go to get information and commitment to pushing communications about the opportunities for girls at the schools and ADs. At the tournament level, tightening up the seeding will help too. We have the data from all of the placements and head-to-heads, but never used it. This made for some bad mismatches at a few of the tournaments this year. Just need get more aggressive with our promotion, communication and getting things organized so schools and teams can plan. I really don't see how with some level of semi-professional organization, communication and promotion that we can get past the 120+ schools with 5 or more wrestlers threshold. Heck, if the boys keep shrinking at the current rate, they'll fall below that threshold before the end of the decade. Regardless of any minor gripes, we took a big step forward with our girls this year with zero help from IHSAA. If IHSAA doesn't want to come along for the ride, well, forget 'em. I think there's a big enough community here interested in building out this sport and willing to invest behind it.

I think State will also feature some prelim “seeding” matches to seed 5th and 6th place wrestlers who came from a handful of large/split brackets at regionals and couldn’t wrap up before hitting the 5 match limit last week. In other words if you placed third in a split A/B bracket and didn’t get to wrestle the crossover placement match, you still need to wrestle that crossover to get properly seeded. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong about that.

Pork chop/pork loin sandwich make this list? Somewhere just below corn, wrestling website . .. 1. 220 pounders 2. Corn 3. Wrestling website 4. Pork sandwiches 5. ????

As someone who just went through this process, everything here is absolutely correct. Academics combined with showing promise as being highly coachable and "moving well" is something most coaches seem to be looking for. They want to see kids who haven't "peaked" yet. Seek the college coaches out at tournaments and have your wrestler approach them and say hello. They love a confident kid who can talk to adults in a friendly and competent manner. Finally, don't emphasize sports over finding the right academic program. Even $50-$60k spread over four years pales in comparison to what getting the right degree in a field you love can do for you over a lifetime. You can always switch to wrestling, grappling, bjj, helping coach for fun and fitness. Despite lots of compelling offers to wrestle, in the end, my wrestler fell in love with a school that didn't offer wrestling. It was the right fit academically with the right programs and right cultural vibe to thrive and set off on a great direction in life. A little sad for me? Yes. But very happy that we found a great fit.

Gary @Ironbear Myers put it together last year with help from Jason DeLois. No small task during a pandemic. Maybe there will be enough girls this year for north/south/east/west!

We’ve had between 6-8 in the room at any one time. Only one has significant experience. The others are eager to try. Of course, they all almost weigh the same. The girls tournaments this year are being very inclusive and seem very focused on building the sport and creating learning opportunities. They’ll see the top girls consistently in the finals and give them something to look forward to.

Can we enter multiple girls into same weight class at these tournaments ? Six first-time girls showed up this week for practice. Two are 113. Two are 120. Two are 130. Go figure. Trying to get them as many opportunities to learn as possible.

Thanks @CoachG very helpful as we fill in the schedule. You da best!

Had callouts last week. Half a dozen young ladies showed up! Five more than last year. Trying to build their schedule over the next few weeks with the regular season girls invitationals. Decatur used to hold one in late November. Lebanon and Penn in December. IHSGW Regionals usually early January and State in mid January. Does anyone know if/when/where girls invitationals will be this year? Can we list them here as they become known? Thanks!

The first Power Five conference school to do so. I have to believe that others will follow. Huge validation for women's wrestling. https://www.flowrestling.org/articles/7156213-breaking-iowa-adds-womens-wrestling?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

I think this is exceptionally true and there was a good conversation about this a few weeks ago. Like most things around here, it started as one topic, but quickly shifted to another and evolved as the thread carried on. The long story short was that if you're going to compete at the highest levels now you need to have specialized and do a ton of off-season club training and tournaments. This makes it harder than ever to be a multi-sport athlete. Maybe you like to do cross country in the fall. You'll miss pre-season folkstyle tournaments. Maybe you like to track or baseball in the spring. You'll miss the freestyle season. Next thing you know, you're behind the competition and unranked because you were off doing other things. And heaven forbid you actually be a kid in the summer, have a summer job and maybe spend a few weeks on a lake somewhere. I know several really good wrestlers who are now in their junior and senior years. State placers. Have had good showings in the national tournaments. A bunch of them are starting to ask whether it's all been worth it and whether they want to wrestle in college. Sure it can knock a few grand off the price of tuition, but except for a select few will wrestling ever "pay all the bills" in college, let alone after. I'm not suggesting that any of this is unique to our sport, by the way. It's the current reality of amateur sports. As coaches and parents we need to find ways to support our young athletes however they choose. We can't live out our own dreams through them. If they're in this for the long term and committed to being the best, we support them. If they're doing it now because it's fun and challenging, we need to support that too. I don't want any kid to miss out on the benefits that wrestling offers in terms of self discipline, self confidence, ability to deal with challenges and loss, just because they weren't interested in putting in the insane amount of work required to reach the upper echelon.

Both points here are valid ones. The freestyle training and the reduced burnout from starting later both play a role IMHO. That said, girls wrestling is quickly headed toward more burnout. A very talented young lady on our team wrestles a half dozen preseason events, a full boys high school season and then post-season events. That's over 100 matches. Though she is being actively recruited for college, she's thinking that she'd prefer not to wrestle after HS. Sad, but I get it.

In past years, there have been regular season, girls only tournaments (that count as qualified weigh-ins) at Lebanon, Penn, Maconaquah and Decatur. Only two of those happened last year. As we are already beginning to build the schedule for next year, it would be great to know if/when these or others might be planned. Demonstrating that there is already a strong and well organized schedule for girls only will definitely help with the emerging sport process as well.

The last two nights have provided some excellent, very exciting wrestling. The coverage and commentary has been really good too. A great late-summer fix to get us looking forward to our own pre-season. So much more fun than watching Chopped or the Bachelor.

Perhaps some repechage, fromage and decolletage will do the trick. That combination can be very influential.

Maybe I'm naive to certain nuances of the Olympic rulebook, but putting Kayla on the shot clock seemed completely arbitrary and wholly unnecessary. She had literally spent the minute beforehand grinding out and securing a tough takedown. That's the opposite of passivity in my estimation. Maybe, I'm not understanding some special rule here . . . because I was also surprised to learn that if you fail a throw attempt and end up on bottom (essentially taking yourself down), you get stood back up. The other opponent doesn't get two points for a takedown. Weird.

I guess that's fine. The process at this point is literally a formality as much of the criteria for the emerging sport process is already met or exceeded, it just hasn't been formally documented. With 37 states already sanctioned, it just feels off that we'd be among the last to "officially" move on this because of paperwork and process issues. Hoping that guidance gets delivered directly to the Athletic Directors and coaches on how to speed this along (e.g., officially indicate that you have or are forming a girls team, have a head coach for said team, where to send that information, etc . . . .)

I don't know any of the rationale, but the girls wrestling one sounds like an administrative "kick the can down the road" approach. Also enables a soft "no" without having to actually vote "no" which wouldn't look great politically. Not sure what the "emerging sport process" actually entails either as there isn't any documentation on the website. If anyone knows what that process involves, that'd be great too.

Great young lady from a great family. So happy for the Chowning clan!

Lourdes is getting a quality wrestler and overall amazing person. Congrats to Sarah and the entire Huse family.

Great first night for Friday Night girl's freestyle with 14 top quality girls in the room at Region Wrestling Academy. Thanks to the RWA coaches for putting this together and Jason DeLois for bringing up a few girls from the Indy area. Really excited to see this happening. Spread the world. Let's keep it growing!