By Rich Winter 

605 Sports

PIERRE — Up until Sunday afternoon things were going along normally for the selection of the eight teams that would be participating in the state dual tournaments Feb. 14-15. 

Board members from the South Dakota High School Activities Association gathered Sunday morning, as scheduled, and were looking at paring the 10-team fields to eight before they ran into problems. 

“Right away we found some duals had not been entered,” Dan Swartos, executive director of the SDHSAA, said. 

Swartos and the high school activities association board members made the decision late Sunday to go to a 10-team bracket. The pairings were originally scheduled to be released Sunday evening but weren’t released until Monday afternoon. The lateness of the release partially had to do with two specific inquiries. 

“We had two inquiries, one from each class, essentially questioning the validity of the system,” Swartos said. “One involved a dual that was moved and another system we used instead of the language in the SDHSAA handbook.” 

When it was finally announced Monday that a 10-team field for each class made the state dual tournaments, Swartos said he heard immediate backlash to the decision. 

On Monday night, Swartos and his team conducted Zoom meetings with all 10-wrestling teams and their athletic directors for both classes. Following those meetings conducted Monday, the plan was to go with the 10-team field for both classes. 

“Right away Tuesday we ended up with several schools that had requested hearings from our board of directors,” Swartos said. “It felt like there would be more schools requesting hearings."

Complicating matters was that of the nine board of directors, five of them had teams that were involved in the state dual tournaments. 

More conversations ensued. 

“We didn’t have enough members to hold a hearing,” Swartos said. “Looking at it all, the situation, the grievances and the potential legal action (none was mentioned or threatened) we talked it through as a board and the consensus was to walk this back and go with the eight that were originally selected. 

Swartos called the two days of lengthy discussion a lesson in leadership.

“We are going to look at that system because we don’t want to go through this again,” he said. “This is a lesson in leadership for me, and it’s never easy to put your hand up and I own that as a leader.” 

Swartos added, “We have language that needs to be cleaned up outside of the dual and to allow that there is some gray area. We have some situations that we need to clean up and fix the seeding system.” 

The top seeds for the state dual tournaments are Sturgis (Class A) and Canton (Class B). The first-round pairings for this week’s dual state tournament in Pierre include: 

Class B Dual Matches – Friday, Feb. 14 

No. 1 Canton vs No. 8 Parkston

No. 4 Bon Homme/Avon vs No. 5 Stanley County

No. 2 Philip/Kadoka Area/Wall vs No. 7 Clark/Willow Lake

No. 3 Kingsbury County vs No. 6 Winner 

Class A Dual Matches – Saturday, Feb. 15

No. 1 Sturgis Brown vs No. 8 Madison

No. 4 West Central vs No. 5 Rapid City Stevens

No. 2 Aberdeen Central vs No. 7 Harrisburg

No. 3 Watertown vs No. 6 Brandon Valley