All-Area (or county, etc.) teams

You can't always trust your gut. Sometimes it tells you McDonald's when you know it's an Arby's night.

 

there's not a lot of good your gut should ever say about mcdonald's, my friend. and arby's new chicken blt is pretty darn good.

 

What we did this year was handicap the coaches votes - specifically, 1:2 1/2 against the writers and stringers. 1 1/2 times on designated perimeter teams we didn't cover but include in our circulation. Votes then were counted in reverse order from 10-1 in terms of points. It gave a minimum, but measurable, benefit to those teams who might have been at an unfair disadvantage if we didn't see them. We picked eight boys and eight girls this way and then added two wildcards who were left off the ballots but were the most worthy among those left out. It worked out pretty good. I could count five, maybe six coaches who had some idiot ballots. None can vote for their own kids anyway but the top of some of their lists included kids who were anything from best coaching buddy's girl to a boy who had a recognizable name. On one of those, I called the coach of the player and told him I had this kid ranked as the third best player on his team. He agreed. Maybe even fourth, he said. So I knew we made the right move by not voting for this kid, although if you'd counted coach ballots seperately, he'd been in the top five vote-getters.

 

No, he refused to nominate his consensus state player of the year for our all-area team.

Under the "we've always done it this way" policy of the SE at the time, if a coach didn't nominate his own player, he didn't get on.

 

then why didn't you nominate the player?

 

Apparently you didn't keep up with the thread.

 

To me, wrestling was always the easiest of off.

With a few exceptions, you started with New England champs, then State Open champs, then Class meeting champs, then league champs.

The best kids in each class usually wrestled each other several times, so you had a record.

Perfect? No/ Johnny Jumpup loses to Gorilla Monsoon three times, but in the New Englands, Gorilla gets upset by some kid from Rhode Island, and Johnny wins the title. (Of course, it's easier if he pins the little creep from Rhode Island.

 

So your SE was an idiot and as a result your paper look stupid by leaving the best player off the all-area team.

 

Pretty much how I see it.

 

no. i just took a different approach than spnited.