Column: Duals tournament epitomizes ‘team’

Published 10:59 pm Wednesday, January 9, 2008

This is the thinking man’s wrestling event. It’s not that traditional tournaments don’t require strategy, but as all four local wrestling teams prepare for this weekend’s area duals, the wheels are turning in coaches’ heads a little bit more as they plot how to best use their athletes to build a better lineup.

On Saturday, Murray County heads to Kennesaw Mountain High for the Area 5-5A duals, while Dalton, Northwest Whitfield and Southeast head to Rome for Area 7-4A duals. The top two teams in both 5-5A and 7-4A will compete in their respective classification’s state duals Jan. 18-19 in Macon.

This is the seventh season duals has been a postseason competition in Georgia, and its addition to the schedule seems to be welcomed pretty widely by the state’s prep wrestling community.

“It’s that team aspect,” said Northwest coach Allen Tucker, whose Bruins finished fourth at last year’s state duals and head to Rome with the top seed after a 7-0 showing against the rest of the league during the regular season.

A traditional tournament features 14 brackets, one for each weight class. Wrestlers earn team points with their individual success, but it doesn’t quite feel as much like a team event as duals.

A team might win a traditional title despite being weak in a few weight classes or perhaps not even fielding a complete lineup if they have a couple “studs” — wrestlers who are surefire bets to win individual crowns, perhaps even pinning through on their way to the top.

Winning a duals title means everyone must contribute, even if that contribution is simply not getting pinned by a stud. In a traditional tournament, most of the team might be watching — put out by two losses — as a few members of the squad carry the weight the rest of the way.

Not so with duals.

“With the traditional, your kids have got to qualify in the top four,” Tucker said. “You might take half the team to state. With state duals, you take all of your team, plus you want some depth to bump guys around in the lineup. So you end up taking 25 to 30 kids. If you have 14 solid kids, and you might not have a lot of kids who can finish in the top four, you might beat a team that has five studs.

“It gives teams that might not be great tournament teams the opportunity to compete at the state level. I like it. It’s exciting and it seems like it gets more kids and more people involved.”

I always point the uninitiated to two events as a great introduction to wrestling. One is a well-done finals in a traditional tournament, with spotlight face-offs and the appropriate hoopla prior to the start of what are typically top-notch matches. The other is a duals event — at any point in the proceedings.

A traditional tournament, where you’re likely to walk in a gym and see four or more mats going at one time, is not an easy intro to the sport, because it can be a bit chaotic. But a duals tourney is easier to follow, and it keeps coaches on their toes more, too.

The challenge leading up to a traditional tournament is to find your single best wrestler in each weight class.

For duals, coaches must be aware of their options, considering who the other team might send out at a given weight and how they could best counter that scenario.

The best option might be to let a great wrestler bump up a weight class and let a good one — likely the great one’s backup — fill that spot, hoping he’ll still come up with the win. Each team must alternate, weight class by weight class, sending its wrestler for a given match to the scorer’s table first. Then the other team has the chance to decide who it will send.

It’s in finding the best matchups, top to bottom, that the challenge lies.

“That’s why I have assistants,” Tucker said. “As a coaching staff, we get together. (Bruins assistant Thomas Queen) does a good job of analyzing and comparing kids. He’s pretty spot on. He’s real good at staying one step ahead of the other team.”

Tucker said he’s always paying attention to other teams at duals tournaments throughout the season, too, thinking about how he’ll plan for down the road. And as a duals tourney is happening, he’s not above talking to his wrestlers to get an idea about how to set his lineup, either, searching out confidence as a good sign an athlete is ready to deliver.

But with a team that has been not only good but deep, Northwest may not need much strategy to show up well on Saturday.

With their 7-0 record against the rest of Area 7-4A, the Bruins — all of them — should have no problem with confidence in Rome.

— Readers may have noticed some changes to our Web site as a whole, including some small ones in the area of sports.

In addition to the local sports content you’ll find under the main category for “Sports,” there are also sub-sections for “College Sports,” “Outdoors” and another area called “Events.”

Under “Events,” you’ll always be able to see the current local sports calendar as well as the area’s high school and middle school schedule for the week. Other information included here might be announcements about sports-related happenings both in the area and beyond — for example, a bulletin on this weekend’s Atlanta Braves FanFest 2008.

We’ll be making more changes to www.daltondailycitizen.com in the future, too. We hope you’ll visit there frequently to keep up with what’s happening in the area’s sports scene and that when local sports new breaks, you’ll check there first for the story.

Have a suggestion on how the Web site might better serve you? We’d love to hear about it. You can write to sports editor Larry Fleming at larryfleming@daltoncitizen.com or me at martykirkland@daltoncitizen.com.

— After a Christmas break filled with games important to their development, local high school basketball teams got back to region play on Tuesday knowing a little more than a month remains between them and tournament time.

While the break’s tourney games are often touted as stretching a team’s skills — and there’s no argument about the benefit of traveling to play good competition — they’re not the most fan-friendly events. At best, parents may travel to watch midseason tourney basketball, and the rooting section might fall to next to nothing when a team leaves the Peach State altogether, as a few did this season.

But there’s a pretty good payoff for local fans’ patience on the way. On Friday, Northwest Whitfield travels to Dalton for a pair of rivalry matchups that will demand you arrive early for the best seats. Those teams will meet again on Feb. 2 in Tunnel Hill near the end of the regular season.

In addition, Northwest’s teams host Southeast — both of the blue and orange squads won on Dec. 4 — on Saturday.

While all of those games pack the added importance of region play, a Jan. 26 meeting between Dalton and Murray County offers its own intrigue. Murray County routed Dalton 70-32 on Dec. 8 in Chatsworth, one step in a 3-1 start to the season for the Indians.

It hasn’t gone nearly as well since then for the Indians, who are once again finding the going pretty tough in Region 5-5A, but another win over Dalton would no doubt lift some spirits.

The season’s final all-local schedule matchup comes Feb. 2 when Southeast travels to Murray County, which swept on Dec. 14 at Southeast.

— OK, so there have been some impressive performances by local wrestling teams this season, no doubt. Northwest Whitfield went 10-0 at the Cherokee Duals in North Carolina a few days after Christmas. Murray County won 10 duals at an event in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., just before the holiday.

But those runs, although they tell you a lot about how strong the Bruins and Indians have been this season, are specks compared to the mammoth streak that just ended for Brandon High School in Florida.

According to a story from The Associated Press, Brandon had gone 459 duals — a stretch of almost 34 years — without suffering an ‘L.’ How monumental were the expectations to keep the run, a national record, going?

Well, the high school was bold enough to call its own duals tournament “Beat the Streak.” And after all this time, South Dade did, defeating the Eagles 32-28 in the finals of that event on Saturday.

Yet that’s not the most interesting part of the story.

The tourney also bears the name of former coach Jim Graves, with whom the streak originated and rode with for nine years — even though he had no experience with wrestling prior to taking that job. He obviously learned pretty quickly.