Hopefully I can convey this clearly and concisely.
My son took wrestling this past year in middle school (grades 6-8) and went to all the various meets with other schools. At the end of it all, he says his school had the most wins of the “season”. He wrestled varsity but that’s because he was the only kid in his weight class at his school (<72 lbs)
Last weekend, he went to the conference. His school won the conference by five points. On the way home, he said something about all the schools in his region being at the conference. I said I thought only the top however many schools would compete at conference but he said they all were there. My impression is that, in theory, the school with the worst seasonal record could still get the most points at conference and be the champions.
Is this correct? Does the “season” count for nothing? I really know nothing about this from a rules mechanics standpoint and largely just trucked him home from practices and made what events I could to cheer him on. He didn’t really know because he’s 11 years old and just wants to wrestle. Of course, he could also cite every rule on every Pokémon card ever printed but…
My understanding is that wrestling is both an individual and team sport. So everyone gets to the tournament because an individual from the worst team school could still end up the state champion. Could the worst school win the end of season tournament? It’s possible, but unlikely.
Also, in some sports (soccer, for example), there is a regular season “champion”, regardless of any other tournaments.
Also, also, does it really matter? It’s just middle school sports, and it gives them more of a chance to compete, participate, etc.
Oh, I don’t really care from a “It’s not fair” standpoint. Sports isn’t my thing enough to take a stance in that regard. From a strict competitive standpoint, I would have assumed some teams would be eliminated but your comment about the hybrid individual vs team thing makes sense.
My stepson wrestled at middle school level the last two years. At “modified level” the coaches kept track of individual records but there was no team scoring…mainly because matches were between three or four schools at a time, with unbalanced schedules. One team might have had 20 wrestlers, another 30 and the other 40, and so the team with 40 wrestlers would end up competing in more individual bouts overall so that all the wrestlers got a chance to compete.
So, yes, the season was meaningless in a way, but with everyone getting competition it didn’t matter so much.
It likely varies a lot by state. My son wrestled, and there was a conference meet with all the schools in the conference. I believe that the conference meet counted for half the final standings, and the regular season dual meets the other half. Let’s say there are six teams, so after the dual meets everybody has an ordinal from 1 to 6. Then you have the conference meet as a standalone event, everybody gets an ordinal from 1 to 6 in the conference meet. Add the ordinals from the dual meet records plus the conference meets, the lowest number is conference champ, second lowest is second place, etc. I can’t say with 100% certainty that’s how wrestling worked, but I am 100% sure that cross country worked exactly this way.
I don’t know anything about wrestling but I do know high school and college basketball tournaments invite every team from the conference to participate. I have seen the lowest seeded team win the conference tournament.
I’ll add that my daughter’s high school soccer team has a district tournament this week. Her school is the 2nd seed, so they got a bye in the first game but every district team is included. The top two finishers from the District then go to Regionals.
I can tell you before the tournament starts that, at least for her district, it’s likely that the top two seeds will finish 1-2. The top school outscored their district opponents 61-0. My daughter’s school outscored theirs 41-9, with 7 of their goals allowed against the top seed. I think there is a chance that the 2 seed (daughter’s school) could fall a place but about zero chance that the top seed won’t win the District tournament.
I’m not sure how it works in middle school anymore. In high school in Michigan we had three tiers, district, regionals, and state. No matter the record all schools competed in districts. We had ours on a Thursday night against two other schools. The team that won districts would go on to wrestle at regionals and so on to state.
Unless you are in an extremely competitive district the chances are very low that the team with the worst record would win their district. In my experience there is less variance involved with wrestling compared to other sports. Going into most team matches you already have a semi-good idea which individual wrestler is going to win and lose with a few toss-ups. This would be especially apparent with a team with a great record vs. a team with a bad record. The good team will have very good wrestlers at a multitude of weight classes. The bad team might have a stud or two but generally will have weaker wrestlers across the spectrum.