I'm looking forward to a very productive week, and to that end, I'm going to be working on the highlight reel all week and try to get it up here. Above is a pic of David Dennis on the podium after his 2nd place finish at Conference.D3 NCAA tournament brackets come out today. I'll put up a link once they are made public, but I'm not expecting the Centennial to get much love from the seeding committee.
Here is my rant on this topic:
It's an interesting system that rewards the top tier, and in my humble opinion, keeps the bottom at the bottom. With only 1 wildcard spot, the Centennial is tied for the least amount of qualifiers, which is based on previous years performance. The rub is that with only a minimal amount of qualifiers, we have a minimal amount of opportunity to be successful. Without more success, we don't get more spots. I would argue that if you have more opportunity to succeed i.e. more qualifiers, you will utimately have more success. Would David Dennis be an All-American this year? Possibly, but it would be tough. BUT, if he qualified and got the opportunity to compete at the tournament, would his chances of doing better the next year increase? Absolutely! Since we can only send 1 wildcard, we oftentimes send a new group of conference champions each year, who are typically upperclassmen, and the younger talent in the conference don't get the experience, leading to them under-performing on the big stage later. Furthermore, when records and what not are equal, seeds can be determined by strength of conference. Well since our conference is at the bottom, even our very good kids that should be in the run for a seed, don't get one, and therefore go unseeded. When you're unseeded, you draw the best of the best, and the cycle continues.
We don't get seeds, because we haven't perfomed well in the past, but we haven't performed well in the past, because we don't get any good seeds. Furthermore, we don't get more qualifiers because we don't perform because we don't get the seeds!
So what is the solution? I guess the simplest answer is that we have to rise above the adversity and the system, and just get the job done at nationals. Another solution is to wrestle better schedules, but that isn't easy when you're in what is easily the best academic conference in D3 wrestling. We don't miss class time to travel across the country to wrestle the Midwest, Iowa, and Great Lakes conferences, and we don't have as many schools in our immediate areas to compete with as often. We also don't have the budget that some of these schools have, because most of the Centennial Conference schools are true Division 3 schools that pride themselves on that philosophy of academics, athletics, and extracurriculars. Schools like W&L, Gettysburg, Ursinus, etc. offer 20+ varsity sports and take pride in our GPAs and educating our student-athletes. Not that the best wrestling schools don't, but on the whole, we do it much better (and of course W&L does it better than everyone!).
There, now I feel better. I may have to make the weekly rant a staple of this page. Till the next update!
Coach
