Attached is the link to the AIA posting of girls rules. Click Here

The wrestling season is slowing starting up with a few middle school matches here and there including Showlow and Flagstaff Middle School.

As I was reviewing the 2016-17 rule book and some of the links to the NFHS website, I found this article regarding Wrestling Rules Interpretations that was good to review, at least for me.

Looking forward to this years wrestling season!

Note: For those of you using Trackwrestling, I found this link on the AIA site to a Tracking Wrestling Tutorial.

After watching this years 2016 NCAA Wrestling tournament, I was asked several times, “what does ride time mean?”

“Riding Time: Defined as being in control on the mat, for a long period of time, usually used in collegiate wrestling. If one wrestler has more than 1 minute more of riding time than his opponent, he is awarded 1 point at the end of regulation time.”

See the example below of the 2013 NCAA Wrestling National Championships D1 Kyle Dake (Cornell) vs David Taylor (PSU). The point for riding time comes at the end of the match at the 12:00 mark in the video.

Thank you for participating in the 2016 Terminator Tournament in Prescott, Az. I did get to watch the majority of you at one time of another and saw a lot of good things happening. Below are some of the good officiating situations that I noticed:

• I saw calls of stalemates quickly, indicating to me you were watching the situation and recognized that each wrestler could not advance, stopped and restarted and not just letting the wrestlers sit there with no action.
• I know the mats were short/small and I saw good out of bounds calls when no action or the action clearly took them off the mat. When there were some tight situations and a good scramble happening at the edge, you let them go a tad longer, within reason, where you recognized good wrestling and giving the kids the benefit of finishing a good scramble. I’m not saying we allowed them to go way out of bounds, but right there on the edge you were making the judgement of a good official to let good wrestling continue as long as you could and not stopping good wrestling.
• I saw you guys making some very good calls in tight situations and ‘selling’ the call. You were also holding calls until the point(s) were earned.
• One thing we all could do better in these situations is being a better communicator. In these situations indicating no control or that one wrestler was still in control, and then when control is lost or gain, or re-gained, we use our signals to indicate the outcome and let everyone know we were watching and aware of the ‘tight’ situation.
• I think we did well with the situations that took us to the table and we handled it and went back out to continue the match. There were a few situations in which we might have spent too much time discussing it with the coach.

Thanks again Arizona Wrestling Officials.
Charlie Jones