Sign the High School Weight Class Change Petition

As many of you have found out, the high school weight classes were changed by the National Federation of High School Associations this off-season.  There are still fourteen weight classes, but now the lowest is 106 and most of them have been shifted up.  The major issue that many coaches and wrestlers have with the change is that now there is one more upper weight division and one less middle weight division.  The 125-145 range is already a log jam of talent to begin with, and now one talented middleweight from each team that would normally have been a started is now out of luck.  Three of the weight classes that are the same, 145, 152, and 160, are now 7, 8, 9 in the order instead of 8, 9, 10.

I encourage you to read the petition yourself, but in my opinion they shouldn't be taking an opportunity from a middle weight who probably wrestles year round and giving it to an upper weight who may only be wrestling because the football coach told him to choose a sport for the winter.  I am a little biased being a lower weight myself, but I personally think that watching the heavyweights is BORING.  As one referee once joked with me when I was working the scoreboard at a freshman tournament: "It's like watching paint dry.  They should make the heavyweight matches one minute periods and they both start with a stalling warning."

America is getting fatter, no doubt about it, but I sure hope that means our wrestlers aren't getting fatter.  They are plenty of great wrestlers that are well below the 103 limit.  Some arguments from raising the lowest class was to discourage weight cutting, but anyone  who knows wrestling knows that there will always be weight cutting if we keep our current system.  In fact, I'd argue that the new weight classes encourage more cutting.  For example, if a wrestler were about 111, he may have thought that 103 was out of reach, but now that it was raised to 106 he may be tempted to cut down when he otherwise would have gone 112.

Here is the link for the petition:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dGlfNE1ZSG9aRE5Nb3lhZHJ6Xzh3emc6MQ#gid=0

Sign it and pass it on,
Jeff