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A humble congratulations to the Union County boys for crowning 3 champions and winning what I consider to be one of the toughest tournaments south of Pennsylvania and Ohio, The Evansville Mater Dei Christmas Tournament. Most of the toughest teams in Indiana participate in this tournament. In the past teams from Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia have also participated. I don't have access to the tournament's history, but I cannot remember over the past 30 years a team from Kentucky winning this thing. Great performance by the boys from Union County, St. X and Trinity

7 freshmen and an eighth grader

What's crazy is the team has only 4 seniors, 3 sophomores. 7 freshman. They were missing a sophomore due to injury and had 8 freshman competing in this tournament.

Union County won the Mater Dei Christmas Tournament in ‘12 and ‘16, but no doubt a rarity for any team in the past 30+ years, outside of Mater Dei. Heck of a performance from our three Kentucky teams.

What were some of the best matches you seen at WCI? top matches I see was: #3 Davis beat #6 Condi 8-6 #2 Whorton beat #3 Morris 4-2 in ot #7 Walls beat #8 Nardelli 3-1 #4 Mccourt beat #2 Mettling 3-1 #2 Price pinned #4 Cranfill in the 3rd.

Interestingly, they found on average the age was 10 (although plus or minus 2.5 years). This is older than many may think, but explains well why so many kids that start too young burn out. Also, in these examples many of the wrestlers started wrestling full time. As a strength and conditioning coach I know that it is better for young kids to play many sports to build better neuro-muscular programing and not to specialize until they are older, say in high school. This article also found that there were differences based upon size. Larger wrestlers need more time to grow into their bodies. That means a heavyweight needs more time for his body's coordination to grow into his constantly changing size. Smaller kids do not have this problem. That means a big kid might be a fish his freshman year but a stud by the time he is a senior or older. Finally it found that it takes a full 15-17 years to peak.