One of the biggest problems I have seen with wrestling in Pennsylvania is the declining number of wrestlers at all levels. This has caused team dual meets to last as little as 30 real-time minutes and an average of three to four forfeits per dual meet. This is a massive problem and leaves wrestling in a vulnerable spot at the high school level.

Just think about this quickly. A school will send their team 45 minutes away to compete in a dual meet that night. This means that the school district will have to pay for transportation for both the Junior High and High School teams. Also, with numbers down as much as they are now, schools are not sending entire teams unless you are a top program like Notre Dame GP, Southern Columbia, and Reynolds, to name a few. So your Junior High team gives up three forfeits, and the other team gives up 2; there are 5 or 6 pins and maybe two that go the full distance. Then you get the same result from your High School team, most likely. At some point, as an administrator, it is not worth spending the money to send your teams for a single, dual meet, especially when you can only fill a little over half of the roster.

With that being said, there needs to be a feasible solution that makes sense for the school and provides all the wrestlers on the team with the opportunity to compete.

My solution would be weekly Regional Open tournaments that schools can pick and choose from as little as six tournaments a year to attend with the opportunity to host a tournament.

These regions can be broken up the same way that regions are broken up in the state. So for PA, we have NE, SE, SW, NW, and SC. The SC region is only used in AAA, so those schools will split up into the SE and SW region for the regular season and then return to the SC region when postseason wrestling starts.

Each region can hold two weekly tournaments for schools to choose from. This will help keep the brackets relatively lower and might prevent schools from going multiple days because of the NFHS rule that only allows wrestlers to compete in 6 matches per day (Rule 1-4-3 Exception).

The season can be broken down into eight to nine weeks, resulting in 16-18 tournaments per region in both the Junior High and High School levels. Tournaments could be held on Friday or Saturday to make it easier for schools to plan transport and other costs for hosting or sending their team to the tournaments.

This would also help out with referees. The numbers of new referees are falling well behind the numbers of officials leaving, and with scheduling issues and weather, it could get harder to get enough officials for all of these dual meets. With weekly tournaments, officials will be able to clear their schedules, and it will provide for more officials at these events.

This will ultimately eliminate the Team State Championship. I know, some might not like that, but if you know PA wrestling, the Team Dual Championships have come down to who can put a full roster out on the mat, and it has led to the same five or six schools in both AA and AAA being at the top. The NCAA decides the team champion with team scores at the individual championships; why not do it at the state level?

The next concern could be, will it take away from the established tournaments like Powerade or Super 32? The answer is no. These are all open tournaments, similar to many of the beginning of the season tournaments we see in college. So a school can send as many wrestlers to a tournament as they want. For example, the school could be planning on sending their school to a tournament, but some of the wrestlers on that team want to go to, for example, Walsh Jesuit Ironman that falls on the same weekend. Those wrestlers can still attend Ironman and compete as they always have, the rest of their team will go to the regional tournament, so everyone will still wrestle.

The next concern might be, how will this help improve participation numbers for your school? Well, quite frankly, it will not help boost numbers directly. Look, the opportunity is out there for kids who want to wrestle, to wrestle. It is up to the kids to want to go out and participate. The hope of the open tournaments is that it will give everyone on the team the opportunity to compete that weekend. It will help keep all the wrestlers engaged in the sport and might, indirectly, help boost numbers if kids catch on; they will be able to wrestle each weekend.

Look, wrestling is a great sport and provides many kids with great opportunities. However, there is a massive problem in the sport that needs to be addressed. Declining numbers from athletes and costs are a driving factor in wrestling being one of your school’s top sports on the chopping block. As much as some do not want to hear that, it is true. This is a realistic solution for the sport at the high school level. The importance of team duals has been diminishing over the years, and the numbers I do not think will ever come back. The best way for these kids to compete and encourage more wrestlers to compete is to provide them with the opportunity to face the best that the region offers each weekend. Recruiting exposure will be easier for kids at smaller schools because they will face tough competition each week and help wrestlers prepare for the postseason, which will get more challenging because of the familiarity with some of these wrestlers, and wrestlers facing tough competition all year will make every wrestler better.