Built by a Coach, for Coaches

I never planned on becoming a head coach the way I did. I became one out of an emergency.

Starting Out of Necessity

Our former head coach had to step down at the last minute. At the time I was coaching our junior high team, and if I am honest, junior high matchups were never really about winning the match. That level is about experience: getting kids on the mat, letting them learn, and building a love for the sport. So when I moved up to head coach, I was learning the varsity side of lineups on the fly.

Year One: Pen and Paper

For most of my first season I did everything with pen and paper. We had a smaller roster, so matchups were not as important. I was not bumping wrestlers around very much. Really, I was just trying to give our kids the best match possible, because at the end of the day we were not going to have a lot of team success that year.

Year Two: The Spreadsheet

Then came my second year. We had built the roster up, and suddenly we had real opportunities to win duals. I wanted to give our kids every chance to succeed, so I moved to an Excel spreadsheet. Over the season I made it more dynamic and more functional, with drop downs, quick name changes, and a few formulas that made life easier.

But it still did not account for everything, and it was still very manual. Every time a kid missed weight, every time the other team showed up with a different lineup than their roster said, I was back to rebuilding a big part of the sheet.

Why I Built The Wrestling Match Emulator

That is when I built this website. I wanted to be able to change my lineup with the click of a button. I wanted to pull up the page, load my roster, and only have to make the small changes: move one of my wrestlers, or move where an opponent's wrestler was, since the roster was already loaded.

That gave me far more control over how our matchups looked, and it made dual meet prep a lot easier. Instead of spending an hour rebuilding a sheet, I could test three or four lineup ideas in a few minutes and see how each one changed the projected team score.

• Year OnePen and paper, a small roster, and a focus on giving every kid a good match.
• Year TwoA bigger roster, real chances to win duals, and a spreadsheet that was helpful but still manual.
• TodayThe Wrestling Match Emulator: rosters saved, lineups changed in clicks, and projections tuned against real dual meet results.

How the Tool Keeps Getting Better

I test the Emulator against our own real duals. When a projection misses, I look at why, and I tune the scoring. That is how features like placement multipliers and the Boom or Bust flag came about: a real match where the numbers said one thing and anyone who knew the kids would have said another. You can read the details in How the Scoring Works.

Coach Bob Fiedler
Head Wrestling Coach · District XI, Pennsylvania