The Iowa individual state wrestling tournament has undergone an evolution over the last handful of seasons and another change is scheduled for this year. For many years, those who qualified for the tournament were met with a system that produced a bracket through a random draw. Wrestlers who finish as district champions and district runners-up qualify for Des Moines. The only thing that was assured was a district champion would face a district runner up.
Starting with the 2018-9 season, the top eight competitors in each weight class, of the 16 qualifiers, were seeded based on criteria gathered from TrackWrestling including, head-to-head competition, competition against common opponents, returners performance at state, returners performance at districts, and current winning percentage.
Starting with the 2020 season all qualifiers for the state tournament, 16 in each weight class will be seeded. The same criteria from TrackWrestling will be used. Mid-Prairie head wrestling coach Justin Garvey shared his thoughts on the evolution of the tournament and the new system. “It was all random draw. Essentially what it did was took someone from ‘district A’ and paired them with someone from ‘district B’. There was no technical seeding. The only thing that you were sure of going into the tournament is that if you were a first place district finisher then you were going to wrestle a second place district finisher in the first round. Every year the formula would rotate a little bit so you couldn’t track it year to year and know where you were going to be. In my opinion it led to some of the excitement of the tournament. You could have the No. 1 ranked wrestler and the No. 2 ranked wrestler in the second round. There were a lot of people out there that didn’t like that. They didn’t like that the two best guys met up in the second or third round. There are three different companies doing rankings in Iowa. Between them, the top four ranked wrestlers in each weight class are pretty consistent but there are some differing opinions, so that makes using only rankings difficult. They decided to use TrackWrestling to help seed the tournament. Last year we seeded the top eight in each weight class. It seemed to work out pretty well. It’s been this way for the last two years. We took Isaac Boucher to state for his junior season, he wasn’t seeded, he just drew into the bottom half of the bracket and wrestled away. This year he was a seeded wrestler and it didn’t work out as well for us. So I have seen both sides of the coin.”
Practice begins for the upcoming wrestling season on November 16th.