infowrestling

The IHSWCA Duals State Championship qualifying scoring and procedures document is now on the IHSWCA website (see Coach McCormick's post at the bottom of this thread for the link!!). 
 
I wanted to give a heads-up and begin the education process for some changes that have been made to continue to try to get the qualifying process on a good path while the event is still in its infancy. 
 
Small changes:
1. Slight adjustments in scores for advancing to different levels of the state tournament.  Also, scoring totals were halved so that final scores more closely resemble typical tournament scoring.
 
2. The team composition adjustment was eliminated and built into the base scoring.  Instead, there are small bonuses for "full" or close to full lineups in 1A and 2A.
 
3. Because of the one bigger change mentioned below, injury replacements in later rounds (i.e. regional after placing 5th at sectional), will not automatically have points upgraded unless they win matches earning a new advancement level.
 
4. All entered wrestlers at sectional will score points, regardless of the number of matches they wrestled in the season.
 
One big change:
 
There will be no more multiplier to control for difficulty differences between tournament sites.  There was a lot of feedback that it was too confusing and too difficult to calculate on your own.  Instead, we are going to a system of "quotas" according to quality-level "Categories" that are assigned to each sectional and regional, similar to the NCAA quota system used for the national championships. 
 
We believe this quota system will be much, much easier for following your own team's score once you see how it works.  We were able to back-test it extensively on previous years and it is highly accurate as well.
 
Please read this document to understand how it works and to see the sectional and regional Category assignments for 2015:
 
http://indianamat.com/stuff/2015StateDuals.pdf
 
Again, see Coach McCormick's post below for the link to the full scoring document!!

With three years of data under our belt to analyze, and a good amount of feedback from interested parties, the IHSWCA Team State Duals team selection committee, with the outstanding guidance of Mr. Troyer, has finalized the scoring procedures that will be used  to establish the field of teams for the 2015-16 Classed Team State Duals Tournament.
 
Please follow the link below to find the full document which outlines the scoring process for teams to put themselves in a position to earn a berth into next season's Classed Team State Duals event.
 
www.ihswca.org/news/selection2015
 
A big thanks goes out to Mr. Troyer and the selection committee for all of the work they have done in finalizing this important component of our event.
 
Coach McCormick

Harper isn't involved anymore, though, and Coach Strub is a rep now, I believe. 

Yes that is the commitee.

Again, the committee doesn't answer the questions.
 
1. I'm pretty sure the teams with 5 or fewer wrestlers are aware they won't qualify. There's no one that says their scores can't be calculated or their success tracked. Why is eliminating teams with 2 wrestlers "all in" but eliminating teams with 5 not?
 
2. Is this selection process something that is in line with IHSAA principles in the first place?
 
A team with 10 wrestlers can win a dual match, a team with 4 or 5 cannot. A decision made on principle and not what is in the best interest of the event is pretty weak, honestly.

I do remember the point being made a while back that the IHsWCA had no intention of creating an event that the IHSAA would adopt. While I am glad the committee, whenever amd however they meet, did decide to take some action, I do think the focus should be on making the event as attractive and competitive as possible. I doubt any of the ten teams that are in between the rule of five and the rule of three care one way or the other about this topic at all.

Thank you for the updates and the reminders........they are very helpful!
 
Couple of questions:
 
1. Which individuals were up for which IHSWCA officer positions?
 
2.  Who are the new IHSWCA officers?
 
I apologize if I missed this in another post or email.

Even with 6 incoming freshmen, the team will not score points for those freshmen.
 
My reasoning behind this is simple.
If a team has five kids and realistically has four semi-state qualifiers and one state placer and all return. Somehow they are in consideration for the voting portion of the process. Is the committee going to vote them in?  
 
What about if they have only three kids and all are state champs? Are they going to vote them in?
 
My guess is the answer to both is NO and if they did they would take a ton of heat.

Thankfully Winchester is leading the way! It's hard to consider any of the other schools in the 1A pool because we have little to no info other than head to heads w Winchester and the ECIC brackets

decbell1  all the Winchester results have been reported with details on the results page throughout the season

SA with a little moving around in the lighter and upper weights. Don't want to give the secret formula away. That's all you need to know for now
 

Sawyer Miller will go all Jeff Heller on someone

So you would rather me just put you in IHSWCA purgatory and not rank you in either?
 
It's simple: I take the number of teams for this year, divide by three, toss EMD up to 3A, even everything out, and then rank the top 10 in each. It has nothing to do with my feelings about the system or how I feel about Oak Hill.

Looks like Gelen Robinson is back on the mat

Some hearty congratulations are due to this Castle stud for pulling off what has to be the biggest upset of the D1 season. The Boilermaker has been turning it on lately, but his 5-4 TB win over #2 James Green was nothing less than spectacular, and has to be the best win by a Purdue or IU wrestler in recent memory. Great job, and I hope this is a springboard to a strong finish to his season.

I start this thread by asking everyone to stay on topic. I feel this thread is 5 days overdue. I had hoped someone else would start it as I'm not much on posting.
 
     I want to thank the IHSWCA and ALL the many people for making last Saturday possible. For anyone whom has never attended one in the past, it is quite the experience for the kids. Where else would you get to see Penn be up 32-6 on Perry and go down to tie breaking criteria? Without this, would you have gotten to see Mater Dei return to the top? How about Bellmont versus Yorktown? These are always the highlight of my season. You will never find a better staff than BJ Faurote, Paul Gunsett, Tim Myers, Brandon Razo, and Sean Faurote. With no Team State, means no Adams Central returning as champs and making the argument Adams County has the best wrestling in the state. I'm just so lucky to have been able to be a small part of it. I can speak directly, the Yorktown wrestlers loved it.
 
     Now to some thank you's:
-Mark Durham, Pat Culp, and Pat Van Horn for all your trackwrestling work.
-Dane Fuelling and staff for all the time and effort in seeding.
-Joe Caprino and indianamat for all the advertising, google hangouts, and media guide.
-Nicole Moss and trainers for keeping all the kids healthy.
-referee's, we love it as the best are there and we get a chance to see how they will call certain situations. Great job!
-Jeff Mosier the announcer.
-JD Minch as he was working tirelessly, I asked him, why? He simply smiled and said, "for the kids". Well, you are a better man than me JD. Thanks!
-Tim Smith, a personal friend who took it upon himself to coordinate all the set up and tear down of mats.
-Yorktown Fire Departments led by Chief David Boone for all the man hours in transporting, setting up, tearing down, and transporting back of the mats.
Finally, Trent McCormick. I'm not sure why he takes on so much all the time. I would like to point out he is NOT the IHSWCA President or Vice President. Yet he took this all on and seen every bit of it through. He worked 20 hour days the four days leading up to the event. No, he did not even sit to coach his team. Worse yet, he did not even take time to coach or even watch his own son. Talk about sacrifice. Again, clearly a better man than me. Thanks so much for the opportunities and experiences you provided to so many kids.
 
     I am certain there are MANY people I forgot. Please feel free to post on here and point out those people. I did recognize the table help too. Like North Montgomery being there and not even wrestling. They worked the entire tourney.
 
 

This topic is going to be given a week vacation so the hot heads can cool down.

We will see =)

First of all, I would like to start out by stating that the IHSWCA Team Duals is great for Indiana Wrestling. After the IHSAA decided (rightly or wrongly) to drop the team state portion of the tournament, the IHSWCA stepped up and has put together a pretty good tournament for help ensure that the State of Indiana Wrestling doesn’t fall even further behind other states in promoting the sport to everyone and not just the top individuals in each weight class. It is very important for the growth of the sport. It is clear with my post here, that we (Portage) would have been really excited to be invited and welcomed an invitation. Sadly, that invitation never was received.
 
This post is not meant to attack the IHSWCA selection committee. It is merely to point out that the current selection process is flawed and can be improved to ensure that the very best metrics are used to project the next season’s top teams get invited to the tournament. Obviously, from a biased point of view, as well as a point of view documented by this season’s results, Portage should have gotten an invite to this year’s tournament and it is hard to call this a Team State Tournament without a team currently ranked #4 in the Indianamat rankings, #3 in the Genius Rankings, and #4 in the IHSWCA 3A rankings.
 
Contention #1: The formula used to select teams seems to be flawed.
 
Obviously, when the 4th ranked team in the state is not even invited to a tournament which invites 12 teams to compete for a dual state tournament, something is amiss. The complex formula used to select teams is very intricate and I have not dug deep enough into it to exactly understand how the points are accumulated from last season’s state tournament. However, I do understand it enough to find the flaws in the system. From what I can tell, the biggest mistake is in the way the multiplier is calculated and applied to the scoring system. When the multiplier system was released on the website last year, I had a very strong negative reaction to the scores. However, not knowing exactly how the numbers would play out and with the IHSWCA bumping up the number of teams invited to 12, we decided to not question them and let the whole thing play out. I have copied the multiplier scores here for those to look. When the scores came out from the sectional and regional results, we were told not to worry the scores will work themselves out.
 
I cannot be certain, but I would take an educated guess that the multiplier had a basis that included an average of all the schools in the sectionals genius rankings. In the East Chicago sectional, that includes quite a few bottom feeder schools that cannot fill a lineup and in the Calumet sectional it includes the Gary schools who not only can’t fill a lineup but were ranked amongst the worst teams in the state by the genius.
 
The problem with this methodology is that only 4 kids advance to the next round. If you have a sectional with 4 squads with solid wrestlers in all 14 weight classes and the rest of your sectional is filled with the worst teams in the state, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is an easy sectional. Perhaps, if this method is continued, there will be a way to use a different criteria to score the multiplier.
 

 
According to the formula that produced the multiplier, it was decided that the Evansville Semi State had the hardest road to get to state, followed by New Castle, Merrillville, and then Fort Wayne.
My first take when these scores were released was that the scores from the two sectionals that lead to the Calumet Regional were insanely low. After crunching the numbers, my intuition was correct. Here is the list of Sectionals by the number of State Placewinners:
 

 
I understood that in order for our team to gain enough points to get in invite to the IHSWCA tournament that we needed guys to advance as far as possible in the individual state tournament. However, based on our multiplier and the fact that the Calumet Regional had the most state placewinners of any regional in the state, we were being punished on both sides. Every guy who advanced for our team had their scoring discounted by us being considered a weak sectional according to the multiplier. However, it is much more difficult to advance in a sectional which produced the greatest number of state placewinners. And even those who did advance, were put into spots with much more difficult draws the next week due to the level of difficultly of beating state placewinners to get a higher seed a better draw the next week. Here is a list of regionals by total state placewinners.
 

 
Next we take a look at state placewinners by Semi State
 

 
In summation, Portage went through an average-to-below average sectional, the toughest regional in the state, and the toughest semi state to advance guys further in the tournament and was given a multiplier of .96.
 
Contention #2: Teams invited to Team State by advancement
While taking a look at the Teams invited to the 3A IHSWCA tournament, I quickly ran down the numbers from last season’s state tournament results.
 
Teams invited to the IHSWCA 3A State Duals advanced the following wrestlers to the regional tournament.
 

 
It is very hard for me to imagine that a team that ended the season ranked 11th in the state, who was tied with Avon for the most returning starters to advance to regionals would fail to get an invite to a tournament in which 12 teams were selected and an additional 2 teams turned down the invite.
 
These same teams advanced the following to the Semi State
 

 
 
Contention #3: A New Point System to determine invitations for IHSWCA State Duals is needed
I propose a scoring system that is much more transparent and easy to understand for the average wrestling coach, fan, and wrestler. My proposal is that Underclassmen get 1 point for advancing to regionals, another point for advancing to semi state, and an additional point for advancing to state. Outgoing seniors score their team .25 in each of these rounds. If you use this scoring system, it does a much better job of matching up with the actual rankings for the 2014-15 season on how good these teams actually are.
 

 
Versus the current scoring system Class 3A Teams
 

 
Again to repeat, this post is not intended to offend or to downplay the great success that the IHSWCA Team State event is. Everyone should be excited about tomorrow, I know that we sure are excited to watch and see what happens. But as the event grew closer, it became more and more bothersome that a top 4 team didn’t even receive an invite out of 14 teams.  We want more than anything to be able to participate in the event and compete for a dual state title. We just don't want this same situation to occur to us, or any other deserving team next season.
 

 
I wish all of the teams competing tomorrow good luck, and look forward to following it all day because after all it is a great day for Indiana Wrestling.
 

Don't worry, Jay County Regional has one of the lowest multipliers yet had 3 teams in the finals.

Transparent and easy to understand is a key message in the previous post. Ive sat down and tried to explain the process to high school wrestlers, high school wrestling fans, and local media members, and it is a true struggle. The IHSWCA Team State is great for wrestling in the state of Indiana. The process by which these teams are chosen needs to be "more transparent and easy to understand" for the common wrestler and wrestling supporter.
 
Without a complex multiplier system we could possibly give more immediate results/updates, which I believe would garner more interest in both the individual and state tournaments along with being more easily explainable to those that matter.

Transparent and easy to understand is a key message in the previous post. Ive sat down and tried to explain the process to high school wrestlers, high school wrestling fans, and local media members, and it is a true struggle. The IHSWCA Team State is great for wrestling in the state of Indiana. The process by which these teams are chosen needs to be "more transparent and easy to understand" for the common wrestler and wrestling supporter.
 
Without a complex multiplier system we could possibly give more immediate results/updates, which I believe would garner more interest in both the individual and state tournaments along with being more easily explainable to those that matter.

Joe Rings the Bell
By Jenny Kieffer —
52 minutes ago
Today was a huge day for Joe and our family, his treatments are finished. Joe will continue to go to Riley Hospital once a month, but only for CBC. His treatments are done. Our Riley family, Joe oncologist Mike Fergusion and all the nurses gather around today to witness Joe ring the survivor bell. On the wall the bell sits, is a plague that reads " Ring this bell three times well, its told to clearly say, my treatments are done, the course has run, and I am on my way". We heard those words and it was awesome, long time waiting. We pass that bell hundred times and all I envisioned was Joe standing in front and saying those words. All the prayers were answered at that moment. Joe is a warrior, and a fighter. Joe has been kicked to the ground, and stood back up and kept plowing forward. He is my inspiration everyday, and we are so stoked for him. I can't say enough thank you's to all the people who have prayed for our family everyday. To all the doctors especially to Mike Fergusion, nurse Jenny, and all the nurses. For all the people who have donated their time and money for children's cancer research. My list of appreciation to everyone would never end. This day was for everyone who walked this same path. Please keep all the children in your nightly prayers. Thanks again,

The Kieffer Family

Eric Myers
Jay County