Timely Information for Takedown Scoring and Stats Users
Budgeting for Next Season
Plan and budget for these items to get more value out of your Takedown investment.
With the scholastic season in the rear view mirror, many teams are already planning for next season. Here are some investments to consider.
External Camera
A game-changer for video. Read about our experience here.
Cost: $100 - $500
Camera Mount
Whether you use the iPad or an external camera for video recording, some sort of stablizing mount is very helpful. Choices include a tripod, monopod and/or a table stand. See examples. Good selection on Amazon.
Cost: $50-$100
External Battery
A life-saver when your iPad’s battery is running low. See example. Great selection on Amazon.
Cost: $50+
Apple AV Adapter
Easiest and cheapest way to use Takedown’s Scoreboard feature. Available for Lightning and USB-C iPad connectors. Don’t forget to get an HDMI cable — Amazon is a good source.
Cost: $50 - $70 for adapter, $10-$20 for HDMI cable
iPad
Upgrade or add another iPad to your Takedown deployment. Amazon and eBay are good sources for used iPads.
Cost: $200 +
Protective iPad Cover
If you drop an unprotected iPad from shoulder height onto a solid floor, the screen will likely crack or worse. A folio cover is cheap insurance. Find a new one on Amazon or eBay.
Cost: $20
Video Subscription
Add a video subscription to your Takedown scoring subscription and reap the benefits of an efficient video workflow.
Cost: $150 annually
Digital Display
For Takedown’s Scoreboard feature, you need an HDMI-equipped display. Schools typically have an inventory of these displays and your school’s gym might already have a compatible wall-mounted display.
Cost: $125 and up, depending on display size.
Bluetooth Scale
Use Takedown’s free paperless, wireless weight recording feature to conveniently track athlete progress toward their weight objective. Takedown is compatible with the Befour PS-6615 scale.
Cost: $700 for scale
Record Practice Attendance and Weight
Recording practice attendance and wrestler weights couldn’t be easier.
Takedown includes the ability to record practice attendance as well as wrestler weigh in and weigh out.
This helpful new feature is accessed in the selections under each Season.
Here’s a quick “how to” for using the feature.
Weigh information can be entered manually or wirelessly via Befour’s bluetooth enable scale. If budget permits, wireless entry is the way to go — simple, accurate and quick.
Associated with this feature are the Practice Attendance and Weight Management reports available in the Reports section of Takedown.
New Feature: Record Practice Attendance, and Weigh In and Weigh Out
Recording practice attendance and wrestler weights could be easier with Takedown 3.0.
Takedown 3.0 includes the ability to record practice attendance as well as wrestler weigh in and weigh out.
This helpful new feature is accessed in the selections under each Season.
Here’s a quick “how to” for using the feature.
Weigh information can be entered manually or wirelessly via Befour’s bluetooth enable scale. If budget permits, wireless entry is the way to go — simple, accurate and quick.
Associated with this feature are the Practice Attendance and Weight Management reports available in the Reports section of Takedown.
How Fat Are College Wrestlers? 2020 - 2021 Edition
Periodic look at the weight certification data for college wrestlers.
Every once in a while we drill down into the college weight certification data. For this past season, 2020 - 2021, we looked at 8,413 wrestlers rostered by 298 NCAA and NAIA wrestling programs. This data is from the week of 3/1/2021, just in time for the Big Ten and NCAA Championships.
You can explore the data on your own here.
From this initial group, 7,907 wrestlers had a certification weight above their Minimum Weight Class (MWC), meaning these athletes must lose weight to achieve MWC. Average body fat % at certification for this group is 16.2% with a range of 14% to 29% depending on MWC.
If all wrestlers in this group dropped to their MWC, the average body fat is 7.1% with a narrow range of 6.5% to 7.7% excluding the 285 weight class. As in 2019-2020, if all wrestlers (except 285 pounders) sucked down to their MWC the fattest weight class is 125 pounds at an average 7.7% body fat.
For NCAA Division I wrestling teams, average body fat % at certification is 15.3% with a range of 13.8% to 16.2% depending on conference.
Other Fun Facts
Average roster size: 28.2
Redshirts: 20% of all rostered wrestlers
1st year of eligibility: 41% of all rostered wrestlers
Average weight of all wrestlers at certification: 175.8 pounds
Aggregate weight of all wrestlers at certification: 739 tons
Aggregate drop to get to Minimum Weight Class: 66 tons
At certification and on average, a wrestler from:
Univ of Michigan weighs more than Michigan State by 2.7 pounds
Univ of Oklahoma weighs more than Oklahoma State by .9 pounds
Iowa State weighs more than Univ of Iowa by 1.4 pounds
Penn State weight more than Ohio State by 1.6 pounds
Army weighs more than Navy by 14.2 pounds
Air Force weighs more than Navy by 1.3 pounds
More Information
How Fat Are High School Wrestlers?
Periodic look at the weight certification data for high school wrestlers. States include California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, …
As with college, every once in a while we drill down into the high school weight certification data.
For this past season, 2019-2020, we looked at data for 80,209 male wrestlers rostered for 3,127 teams in seven states: California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Washington and Nebraska. This data is is from February 2020.
You can explore the data on your own here.
In all states except Pennsylvania, roster size by school year declines from freshman (Fr.) though senior (Sr.) year. In aggregate, Pennsylvania freshman are 22% of the total roster whereas in all other states freshman account for 30-32% of the total state roster.
Average roster size varies considerably in this group from a low of 19.5 (Nebraska) to a high of 31.1 (Texas) wrestlers per team.
Weight Related
Except for 113 pounds, wrestler count by minimum weight class (MWC) is relatively flat from 106 to 145 pounds and then declines steeply from 152 to 285 pounds.
At certification, average body fat percentage ramps from 14.3% at 106 to 23.4% at 220 and then declines a bit for 285.
Roughly 32% of the wrestlers had an assessed body fat of more than 20%.
In this sample, 73,871 wrestlers had a certification weight exceeding their MWC. On average, this group had to drop 9.7% of their certification weight to reach MWC.
Excluding 220 and 285, If all wrestlers in this group dropped to their respective MWC, average body fat is 7.9% with a narrow range of 7.5% (138 MWC) to 9.1% (106 MWC).
Which State is the Fattest?
You decide.
High School Wrestling — Fat % by State
How Fat Are College Wrestlers?
Periodic look at the weight certification data for college wrestlers.
Every once in a while we drill down into the college weight certification data. For this past season, 2019-2020, we looked at data for 7,706 wrestlers rostered by 251 NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA wrestling programs. This data is from the week prior to NCAA Division I conference championships.
You can explore the data on your own here.
In this sample, 7,268 wrestlers have a certification weight (also called assessment weight) in excess of their Minimum Weight Class (MWC). Average body fat % at certification for this group is 15.9% with a range of 14% to 30.3% depending on MWC.
If all wrestlers in this group dropped to their MWC, the average body fat is 6.9% with a narrow range of 6.4% to 7.4% excluding the 285 weight class. Somewhat counterintuitively, at least for me, with all wrestlers (except 285 pounders) sucked down to their MWC the fattest weight class is 125 pounds at an average 7.4% body fat. Didn’t expect that.
For NCAA Division I wrestling teams, average body fat % at certification is 14.8% with a range of 13.6% to 16.7% depending on conference.
Other Fun Facts
Average roster size: 30.7
Redshirts: 19% of all rostered wrestlers
1st year of eligibility: 40% of all rostered wrestlers
Average weight of all wrestlers at certification: 174.2 pounds
Aggregate weight of all wrestlers at certification: 671 tons
Aggregate drop to get to Minimum Weight Class: 60.1 tons
Highest aggregate team weight at certification: 11,600 pounds
Highest average wrestler weight at certification, Division I: 184.1
Want to explore the data on your own?
More Information
Update: Digital Weight Management
Last fall we added to digital weight management to Takedown Scoring and Stats. Developed in partnership with Befour, a leading wrestling scale manufacturer, this new feature enabled paperless weight capture — either manually or via Befour’s bluetooth scale — and a variety of reports and graphs for tracking athlete weight.
During this past high school season (2018-2019), more than 150 schools used this feature to record 17,000+ weigh-ins. Of these weigh-ins, 75% were recorded wirelessly using Befour’s bluetooth scale.
Top five states for digital weight management:
Virginia
Ohio
Wisconsin
California
Pennsylvania
And the top ten programs:
Chantilly, Virginia
Frederick High School, Maryland
Saginaw Heritage, Michigan
Middletown, New York
Chilton High School, Wisconsin
Garden City High School, Kansas
Kirtland High School, Ohio
Palo Alto High School, California
Sulphur, Oklahoma
Revere High School, Ohio
Not surprisingly, most weights were recorded early in the week:
This is an exciting and encouraging start for this new-to-wrestling capability. We will continue working with our partner, Befour, to enhance this feature and promote its adoption throughout the wrestling community.
Related content
Original announcement:
https://www.levelchanger.com/blog/2018/10/2/new-release-paperless-weight-management
NCAA Division I Weight Management — Princeton Article
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2019/03/necessary-difficult-fair-an-investigation-of-wrestling-and-weight-at-princeton
Paperless Weight Management
Safe weight management is healthy for wrestlers and wrestling. Now, you can do it with minimal effort and time investment.
Our newest feature — Paperless Weight Management — is built into Releae 2.11. More information on this feature here: https://www.levelchanger.com/weight-management
Download this release from the App Store. Recommended for all users.
Does Wrestling Have A Concussion Problem?
Wrestling may or may not have a “concussion” problem in the form of unhealthy or extreme weight loss, perceived by prospective wrestlers or the parent community. To be sure, parents are more attentive to health-related risks associated with contact sports and guide their children accordingly. It is also a fact that high school wrestling participation has been trending down for a number of years.
Fortunately, in most states “official” weigh ins — those associated with competition — are tightly monitored and controlled. On the other hand, how wrestlers manage their weight between competitons is loosely monitored and uncontrolled. Extreme weight loss — up or down — can and does occur in the inter-competition period. Stories abound — and parents are aware — of wrestlers gaining a lot of weight post-competition and losing too much weight just prior to competition. This is risky and potentially unhealthy behavior, especially at pre-college levels. Yet, sanctioning bodies — state or national — exercise no oversight of between competition weights.
Impractical for Many Teams
Coaches are in a difficult spot. Recording weight for each wrestler before or after wrestling practice is time-consuming and labor intensive. Further, , organizing, interpreting and sharing the data is non-trivial. Lastly, alerting wrestlers (and parents) to unhealthy weight excursions is yet another task. Most teams don’t have the time or resources to undertake this effort in a systematic way. Some teams avoid the systematic approach by cherry-picking which wrestlers to monitor or checking weights only as needed or both. In a huge leap of faith, about one-third of coaches delegate to the wrestler the task of keeping their parents apprised of weight-related issues.
Paperless Weight Management is Here
We’ve had paperless weight management in our development plan for a few years but it never made the cut. Late last spring, Befour, a leading supplier of wrestling scales, approached us about a partnership to integrate paperless weight management into Takedown. The timing was right as we were finishing up video and having a heavy-weight (sorry) partner made the opportunity attractive. Befour has proven to be a reliable and helpful partner.
Takedown’s paperless weight management feature makes it easy and time efficient to record weights. In addition, our Reports now include three visualizations — a table and two graphs — that make it easy to identify unhealthy or non-compliant weight loss. These visualizations, like all Takedown Reports, can be emailed or exported in spreadsheet format from within the app. For the first time, a systematic, time-efficient approach to weight management is possible for any wrestling team.
For more details about Takedown’s paperless weight management, see: https://www.levelchanger.com/weight-management .
Takedown Scoring and Stats Release 2.8
Release 2.8. If you like typing information into the OPC on Trackwrestling, don't read this post. If you want to save yourself some late nights and headaches, read on.
Release 2.8 is available for download from the App Store. This is a recommended update for all users.
The significant new feature in this release is uploading match results and weigh-ins to the NWCA OPC which is currently hosted on Trackwrestling.
Upload Match Results or Weigh In to Trackwrestling account
Typing competition-related data into the OPC takes a lot of time. Mistakes are often made and navigating the OPC can be awkward and clunky. With this new feature, Takedown offers users a quick, easy and accurate way for entering competition data into the OPC. Just tap a few buttons and you're done, often in a minute or less.
Use this new feature to reclaim wasted effort, and improve the accuracy and timeliness of your OPC data entry. Download Takedown Scoring and Stats today and say good bye to the headache of manually entering data into the OPC hosted on Trackwrestling.
Here's a tutorial on Takedown's new Upload Match Results to Trackwrestling feature.
How Fat are High School Wrestlers?
Our annual look at fat percentage at certification.
We looked at various data from the weight certification process conducted by state high school wrestling associations during the 2016-17 season. For the 226,000 wrestlers in the database, average fat percentage at certification was 16.9%, up slightly from 16.6% in the previous year.
By grade, fat percentage at certification dips for eight graders then trends back up and levels off in 10th grade.
Tap or click the graph to enlarge
By minimum weight class, average fat percentage looks very similar to the last two seasons.
Tap or click the graph to enlarge.
Lastly, a look at fat percentage at certification by state.
Tap or click the graph to enlarge.
New Mexico sure has some lean wrestlers! Note that the two states with the highest fat percentage at certification -- Oklahoma and Texas -- are the same two states that added the most wrestlers from 2010-11 to 2015-16. Hmmm.