I keep hearing that officials are human and they will make mistakes. I agree wholeheartedly and this belief is the basis for my greatest concern.

I have seen match after match where an official gave points too early. Escapes and takedowns are the top culprits. What I hate to see is a ref who makes the quick call and then doesn't stop the match and say, "no, that was too fast."

Example: I watched a kid on top go out front to work a front quarter and the ref gave him an escape, then when he spun back behind he gave a takedown. There was never a neutral position by the defensive man. He was on his knees in a base the whole time and had his head planted for most of the time. The official just stuck by his call, even with both coaches shaking their heads.

So, how do we change this? Fist of all, the coaches need to shut up and let officials do the officiating. The 2nd step is when officials do change and make the right call, we need to accept and appreciate. The last thing is that we need to stop arguing subjective calls (stalling, reaction time calls, etc).

And finally, I feel the officials should do like other states and call coaches on the carpet. If the coach argues, either change the call or penalize the coach. The officials are letting too much abuse by coaches go on and coaches have no reason to stop. (Hey, my 2 year old will keep yelling if I let him.)

It's about time that everyone realizes that the refs are human and that they are gonna make mistakes. What we as coaches and wrestlers can do is make ourselves better wrestlers so that one little call does not lose us the match. And also we have got to mentally break the kids so that they don't break down in mentally and lose the match. I saw a lot of good wrestlers get in a close match ref make a bad call and then they break mentally and lose the match, this is the wrestlers and the coaches fault, because your wrestler had a weakness. Now it is time for the Coaches to start pushing their athletes to the point that it will help them, whether people beleive it or not there is a lot more to wrestling than the moves, peolpe don't understand the importance of being mentally strong. So parents you need to encourage the COACHES to push your kids if you would like them to get to the next level, you gotta let the coach do what he needs to most of the time. And I say let the COACHES do it because if you do it as a parent it will be worse on MOST of the kids because they think of it as a punishment. It's time that Oregon works together to rebuild our wrestling programs that are going down hill that meens parents, coaches, and wrestlers if your coach is on you hard it is because he wants to make you better. Some of the coaches you guys don't like were the best coaches for the reasons that you don't like them

Refs are people that nominate themselves for the job and then go through training for it, maybe the OSAA needs to reveiw the refs performances and they should send someone every once in a while to the tournaments to give these refs evaluations. I hear your complaint about refs and it is the truth. But I hear way to many kids that are just using that as an excuse any more, or I see kids that a ref makes a bad call in the first round, and the kids get's mad and frustrated and does not wrestle a good match and loses because he could handle the call and broke. That is what I think that it is important that we try to prevent from happening with kids.

I am not blind I see a problem with reffing, and I think that they need to be evaluated a little more by a committee. That's maybe something that we could do is form a committe for this purpose, but first we would have to get support from the OSAA on this, because if not then we would evaluate them but nothing would ever get done.

I think if we want something done about this that we need to start working together on the topic instead of arguing about it.