I'm not going to speculate as to all the reasons why the WIAA expanded the state tournament, but it always seems to come down to the argument that there are tougher districts and there are weaker districts. The tougher districts want to make sure their kid gets to state so they have a shot at placing so this will inevitably lead to expansion. There are always degrees when it comes down to who people think "deserve" to go to state, but it seems as if enough is enough. When I was in high school, which is likely close to when Coach Feist was in high school, there were only three divisions. It was tougher to get to state and once you were at state, you had to place top 6. That meant that if you were in the consolation bracket, you had to weigh in the second day and had to win that first match to place. Several of my teammates lost that first consolation match and never placed. To make matters worse, we only had 13 weight classes. Today, we have 5 divisions and place 8 per 14 weight classes. This means that instead of 234 placers, we now place 560 wrestlers in the boys division.
There is also the issue of Title 9 and in order to make things equitable for boys and girls, the girls now have 4 divisions. I'm all or opportunity, but does anyone else see how this slope gets slippery really quickly? Washington state high school wrestling has definitely gotten watered down.
Here is another sobering fact, California with the country's biggest population of almost 40 million has one state champion per weight. Washington has almost 8 million. They have 5 times our population, but place 2.5% of what we place. Adjusted for population, Washington has 1 state wrestling placer per 14000 people +/_. California has one placer for every 2,857,000 people, giving us about 200 times the number of placers per capita. That means their state placing is 200 times harder to accomplish if you just use population as the standard.
It's funny to me that wrestlers and wrestling coaches are some of the first to argue that we shouldn't be giving out participation trophies to everyone, but we now have what we have today because lots of coaches were in favor of it. I sure hope we are done with expansion, at least for a while.