Thursday, March 21, 2013

Innovation at Work

Alas, my favorite wrestler in this year's tournament, Minnesota's Dylan Ness, lost today, so I'm quite bummed. Last week he pulled this awesome move to win the Big Ten tournament:



On the bright side,  they have actually changed the format this year to accommodate fan interest, and moved the 165 pound final to the end of the tournament. This upset some people, but I think there's a balance between catering to the whims of the public via X-game type sports, and modifying your sport to be interesting to more people. The key is, there's a great match between two dominant wrestlers at 165 (Dake and Taylor), so why not have this at the end of the tournament, rather than the typical route, to have the heavyweights last, as they are typically the most boring weight class. I think they should get rid of singlets, riding time next.

 If you go to Trackwrestling.com, click on the NCAA link and you will see the results from the NCAA wrestling championships in real time, match by match. I had some down time while coaching at our youth state tournament, and volunteered to be a matside scorekeeper. This Trackwrestling software allowed me to score things on a laptop that registered results with a main computer in real time. New matches were queued up automatically (eg, mat 8 has Jones-Smith next, Davis-Johnson in the hole), and were communicated to the wrestlers via a giant screen. Even scoring was helped, as the software wouldn't allow me to mistakenly give an escape point for a wrestler who just made a takedown.

 The real benefit came from the fact the same software is used to score, communicate, and direct who wrestles whom, where and when, all done automatically. Previously this was a Chinese fire drill, with all the attendant mistakes from dropping sheets, etc. A huge productivity boost. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That was pretty crazy, looks like he's pretty good at scrambling.

Taruhan bola online said...

looks like he's pretty good at scrambling.... this is crazyy