Hosting The Largest Tournament of the Year
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Weekly Updates on KWK’s Progress Throughout the Season
January 17, 2024
Week 7
Hosting The Biggest Tournament of the Year
First and foremost we have to answer the question on everyone’s mind, we sold 80 pizzas! I went to Bill’s the next day and we are their new favorite youth team! Bill said something about retiring to Cabo.
But in all seriousness, what a weekend it was! That will be the biggest event of the year! 500 wrestlers competing in that day is CRAZY! I want to thank all of our volunteers, including coaches who ran around all day helping our kids, those who made food, worked concessions and the tables. You all did an amazing job. As you can see it’s a wild day. I want to give a special enormous thank you to Sam Cruz who runs the ship out there! She has been doing this for 3 or 4 years now and she is by far the only reason we can do this. If it was left up to me I’d definitely forget stuff!!!
I told this to the wrestlers, what they did this weekend is no small feat. Merely stepping on the mat and competing in front of over 1000 people is a massive accomplishment. Not many if any at all other kids can say they have done that. It is a crazy and loud environment that these kids go out and wrestle through. I am beyond impressed with how all of the kids stepped up and handled that scene.
If at this point you haven’t questioned everyone’s sanity yet then you are one of us! Welcome to wrestling!!!
With all the positives I can list comes the obvious wait time and length of the day. I would love to say we ran a perfect event, but I and I really really really mean I made a few mistakes that cost us a lot of time.
So you understand we create brackets of kids in our system. Check out the article on tournaments for more information about bracketing. Once the brackets are made it can be very difficult to change them and move kids around. The first mistake we made was when parents realized they had registered for the wrong tournament we re-bracketed the event. We did this 2-3 times and this cost our event the very first hour of wrestling. What comes of this is kids get competitive matches in the right brackets. But, we ended up upsetting the rest of the tournament for wasting time.
The second mistake was having 500 kids. This caused two problems. The first was spacing. Having all those kids, and people jammed in that gym is not ideal. The second problem was I ordered medals for the tournament prior to the event. We usually only have 300 kids and order more than enough considering I still have some left from last year. However, with 500 kids registered on Friday night we realized we wouldn’t have enough medals to go around unless we limited the number of brackets causing us to build 5-man round robins rather than 4-man round robins (that’s the type of bracketing the younger kids did). With that, we added another round of wrestling which we calculated to another 1.5 hours.
In total our event ran 2 hours too long from the morning session. We made two mistakes. Those two mistakes will be fixed next year in one or all of the following ways:
Build a clearer registration process
Get a bigger gym space
Get more mat space in the cafe
Limit the amount of wrestlers competing
We are already working on improvements for next year! I have called Gillette Stadium and asked about their practice facility. It was $25k/HOUR, so we wont be going there! But, I’m trying to be innovative. If you have ideas, let me know!
Overall, massive success! I can give a full breakdown of financials and will give a report by the end of the season. Because of our efforts we are able to operate out of a beautiful facility, hire top clinicians, bring in nutritionists, and continue to grow our sport!
HUGE SHOUT OUT
First big shout out goes to Jonel Cruz and Ryan Gill. The two of them were moved into a VERY difficult bracket with potential New England place finishers throughout. Jonel and Ryan have been leading our team and have their eyes on the post season. This tournament put them in a bracket with some of the very best in the region and I couldn’t have been happier to watch the two of them rise up to the competition.
Maybe even a BIGGER shoutout must go to Lawson Gregory!!!! Lawson wrestled all day at the KWK Tournament and decided that wasn’t enough! He went to New England Gold the very next day and wrestled in the Novice Tournament there. Lawson took 1st place following an impressive KWK Tournament as well. Love to see that!
Super proud of everyone of course, but these three stood out to me!
Kryptonite is Bigger Than Just a Town Program
As many of you know this is the first year I am not on the board of directors for the state. But of course I am still heavily involved and deeply connected to the progress of our sport. The KWK Tournament co-hosts the USAW-MA Developmental Tournament or Novice Division for two main reasons.
The first is because we found out recently that although the state offers a tournament series only half of the wrestlers in the state participated in wrestling events at the post season. And in an effort to get more of our community involved in the state we wanted to offer a tournament that could encourage first year wrestlers to participate. Thus, the novice tournament was born.
The novice tournament is co-hosted with KWK not because it is too small to host elsewhere but because the state also wants to host a girls tournament. The reality is, girls wrestling is just not big enough to host its own stand alone tournament. So hosting a girls tournament would be a major loss financially when considering the fees involved in hosting.
KWK co-hosts the Novice Tournament, we pay many of the heavy fees involved in the process, the facility costs, officials, and trainers. This allows the Novice tournament to make a far larger profit for the state, thus allowing it to take a loss on the girls tournament financially.
This balance has seen a rise in girls wrestling. Last year only 50 girls participated in the USAW-MA Girls Tournament. This year it doubled to 100. Because of your efforts we are able to impact more people in the state than just our small borders.
This year we are making even more of an impact. Officials are at an all time low and events are being effected by the lack of officials in our region. USAW-MA met last night and discussed with me what we could do with additional funding due to the rise in both tournaments success. I suggested we take an additional $1000 and host an officials training program at Kryptonite which the state gladly excepted.
Because of your efforts, the KWK Tournament not only gives much needed funding to our program to operate, but allows first year wrestlers get involved in competitive matches, more girls in the state to have matches against other girls and now the growth in officiating throughout the state. It’s truly a tournament that gives back in so many ways, and I couldn’t be more proud of our efforts together!
KWK Tournament Results
I’m not big on wins and losses, not sure if I make that clear enough every time I speak. BUT, here are the results of all of our kids. I was very impressed with these guys wrestling. LOTS of tough brackets and competitive matches. This is a great indicator of where you are right now in the state. So keep wrestling, keep working hard in practice and set high goals!
6U
KWK
Cole Fernandes 1st Place
8U
KWK
Owen Boyle 5th Place
Rye Lasalle 2nd Place
Blake Fernandes 3rd Place
Lawson Gregory 2nd Place
Teddy Decoursey 2nd Place
North Attleboro Youth Wrestling
Geoffrey Burgess 2nd Place
10U
Attleboro Youth Wrestling
Austin Ylijoki 5th Place
Landen Ivory 3rd Place (wrestled with us last year and decided to try basketball. Signed up for KWK, maybe we will see him again!)
North Attleboro Youth Wrestling
Benjamin Nagelberg 3rd Place
Colton Tryon 4th Place
Nicholas Gill 4th Place
Roger Charpentier 5th Place
Ryan Thrasher 1st Place
KWK
Jace Fundakowski 5th Place
12U
KWK
Max Lurie 3rd Place
Alex Custudio 2nd Place
Callen Little 3rd Place
Kieran Couture 3rd Place
North Attleboro Youth Wrestling
AJ Silverstein 2nd Place
Nick Natale 1st Place
15U
KWK
Aschiwat Dempsey 2nd Place
James Lurie
Jeff Connelly
Mace Bancroft 3rd Place
Tommy Tetreault 4th Place
North Attleboro Youth Wrestling
Dylan Oldmixon
John Nagelberg
Jonel Cruz
Kevin Chawan
Logan Thornhill Noviello
Max Hull
Nathaniel Robin 1st Place
Nolan Harrington
Nolan Roderick 3rd Place
Omar Peterson
Patrick Wolfe 4th Place
Ryan Gill 4th Place
Ryan Hamilton
Simon Nasif
Coming Up Next
Milford Youth Wrestling Open
Please register ASAP!
Up next is U10 STATES!!!!
This is a big event for the young kids. Held in Chelmsford all of our U10 kids should enter! U6 competes in Round Robin brackets and do not move on. They are more than welcome to continue practice, and to wrestle at events like the Matches Not Medals we host.
U8 - U10 if they place top 4 (I will double check) but they move on to wrestle at the Youth New England Tournament! It’s very exciting to be considered one of the best athletes in your weight and age in the region! Best of luck and let’s have some fun!!!