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.
You don't think its unethical for a team to attend a tournament for many years and then with just days notice, to send in their B roster?
How is it not an unfair advantage to overschedule your teams and then pick and choose which events you attend with what team?
I can't imagine that a majority of coaches in the state would agree that they would be comfortable signing up for an event, with the impression that their top team would be involved, only to pull out after they didn't like the matchups.
It's not about the opponents you might see on a given Saturday. It's about being honest with other schools athletic departments and showing some integrity.
How is this, in any way, good for the overall sport of wrestling?
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.
Great post. It is a shame that Portage is not in the event. The multiplier is definitely the biggest issue with this whole system. A lot of schools have to do a lot more work than other schools just of because of what sectional and regional that they are in.... Also the Jay County regional had 9 state place winners instead of the 7 that you showed in your table from last year. Jay County's Regional is given one of the worst multipliers also. I do agree that the system needs to be simplified so the average fan can figure out their teams point total.
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.
Well, I took your advice and read the post again, and I have come to the conclusion that you and I have two very different interpretations of what has been posted. The majority of individuals who have commented on this topic have expressed their admiration for the heroic efforts of Jack Chastain as he competed with the flu. However, when someone complemented the performance of the winning wrestler, you appeared to become very defensive.
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bell103 got a reaction from ontherise219 in How Portage got left out of Team State