I think coaches and parents are most of the problem in this state and I'll use a couple examples to illustrate this point. It is not the refs.
1. At the state tournament, there was a point where coaches were calling for coaches reviews on obvious judgement calls that were not misapplications of rules. They waited about 5-10 minutes to get their reviews denied, delaying the tournament, and later complaining that their kids lost because of a terrible call. I get that you want to advocate for your kids, but playing the victim does nothing to help these kids deal with a loss. Then I see Coach Feist in the finals and his kid is on the short end of a questionable call and he tells his wrestler to wrestle through this and in the end doesn't blame anyone for the loss. These two approaches are polar opposites and I don't need to tell anyone which builds character and which builds victims.
2. I was volunteering at Gut Check last year because my daughter was wrestling in it. I saw a friend I hadn't spoken to in a year and wanted to catch up. As we were talking, a coach interrupted us and said that he had an injured athlete. I asked if she was still wrestling and he answered that she was done wrestling for the day, but she was waiting for me to evaluate her injury. I explained to him that I would see her right after my conversation and he proceeded to tell me that I needed to see her now because she was waiting.
When you as any coach about his philosophy he will tell you that wrestling helps deal with adversity and we are here to build character. Yet, when it comes to the situations where they are able to educate their athletes and expose them to how unfair the world really is, they will blame the ref or something else when in the end, it may not matter how prepared you can be, things don't always turn out your way. These are the moments when we are able to make the biggest difference in the lives of our athletes, but instead we turn our kids into victims.
The level of disrespect and victimhood exhibited by coaches is terrible. The reason why some coaches are sought out is that they are great coaches who look out for the well-being of their athletes. These coaches are using wrestling as a tool to build character and not build victims.
Someone in another thread mentioned that these kids work way too hard for refs to be unprepared when reffing and told them to just be better. Parents and coaches, let us be better! People make mistakes and sometimes things happen that are out of our control, but let's be better in building character in our athletes. I know I will get some backlash for these comments, but after year of just observing as a fly on the wall, it is absolutely clear that our coaches(including myself) are the problem.