Or, in the case of #matWOMEN this year, all of the above.
We didn’t make predictions this year because, quite frankly, with a couple of exceptions among the very elite programs, I have no idea what most of y’all’ve got in your rooms right now.
Just this morning, I was in conversation with a coach on Facebook. His team (he’s an assistant at his school) had four or five girls that wrestled consistently, his top girl that wrestled last year graduated.
And his team has 13 girls in the room, he said.
I suspect that school isn’t alone — although I’m sure, too, that not every team will have that many girls.
But when the calendar came out and the girls’ competitive season was able to start a week sooner, I thought it was imperative that we write a separate preview. As it so happens, I think it is the first cumulative girls’ wrestling preview written for Florida. It won’t be the best — my friend Brant’s preview coming up in the next 10-ish days or so will be better — but it is a good jumping-off point.
Writing a preseason preview, good or bad, requires the writer to necessarily look back to what’s happened before.
But I am just as excited to look ahead, and #matWOMEN hopefully not only whets your appetite on what’s coming in the north Florida girls scene, but also gives you a heads-up on how I intend to cover it.
So. To that end, I’m going to require head coaches to send me full results for girls just as we would expect, and have expected, for boys. If there are separate duals, I will want those. If there are separate girls’ matches wrestled as prelim to a dual, I will want those results. And I’ll want full tournament results from your coaches, whether it’s a tournament on the weekend or a midweek roundrobin.
The mechanics of that, I’ll work out with the coaches.
I hope you enjoyed #matWOMEN today. If you’ve got the availability, I hope you’ll consider donating to our efforts. It’s a lot of work to write these previews and maintain the website (we had 14 posts, including this one, today alone). You can use the link below. If you’re not on our Facebook page, join us. Not sure how much longer Twitter will last, but you can go to @NorthFLAMatmen until you can’t (I’ll wait to decide on an alternative later). We’re going to post snapshots of the #matWOMEN previews and post them on nflamatmen, our Instagram page.
We start with the first event Tuesday in Oviedo.
Can’t wait to see y’all wrestle like a girl this year, and shock the world.
North Florida Matmen 