I personally like the mat-side suggestion. It’s simple. If parents/coaches want to continue to encourage their kids to suck weight and then ask their kids to keep their weight there all day without hydrating well or eating well then they truly don’t have their athlete’s best interest in mind. It’s about them; not their kids which is too often the problem in our sport.

The weight assessment plan is a joke. Most of us know that many kids beat the test so it’s pointless and all of us know that the kids don’t follow the “plan” and lose their weight slowly as intended. The lowest assessed weight becomes their target weight for the post-season whether it’s truly healthy or not. They’ve been given a permission slip with the assessment so that weight is then often expected of the athlete by districts—even if the kid has grown 2” or walks around 15 lbs heavier than that up until a week or two before the post season.

If we are going to have a weight “plan” for our kids, there HAS to be more accountability that the kids are following it throughout the season vs. getting assigned a weight at the beginning of the season to shoot for by year’s end.

If we can’t provide better accountability, then the simplest way seems to be mat-side scales. My pop wrestled into college and was asked to lose stupid amounts of weight. It sucked all the joy out of the sport for him and he wasn’t healthy. Because of this, he made a rule to protect me from the system. If I were to get above 5 lbs of the weight I wanted to wrestle at any time during the season, I had to go up a weight there on out. I never once got above 5lbs and wrestled happy all 4 years while I watched my friends yo-yo all year and be miserable 2/3 of the season. Their weight consumed their mind all season. It’s absolutely stupid in my opinion! Wrestling is supposed to be fun and our obsession to suck weight to gain an advantage is seriously dysfunctional. Our job is to protect our kids physically and emotionally.

Fixing this really shouldn’t be hard and giving kids 2-4 lbs between the start of the season to the end now only adds to the problem! I’ve never seen kids suck as hard as they do now believing with the weight allowance they can “just lose a few more pounds” to drop a weight class.