For coaches: running weight across a squad

Three staff, 18 athletes, four weight classes between them and a tournament in 9 days. Nothing in the building says who decides what. That is the ordinary condition of a squad, and none of it becomes visible until something goes wrong in front of witnesses.

Nine questions, and what a blank answer costs

Go through these with the staff rather than alone. The ones nobody can answer inside 10 seconds are where the squad is carrying risk it has not priced.

1. What is the lowest class each athlete may enter, and who worked it out? Where the answer is the head coach's judgement, there is no floor at all, only an opinion that moves with the fixture list. Minimum weight rules describes what a real one is built from.
2. How many hours sit between the scale and the first contest, for each athlete separately? Not for the squad. For each of them, because they are not all under the same system. The weigh-in rules table has every format side by side.
3. Who is permitted to stop a cut, and does the athlete know that person's name? This is the question with the shortest answer and the largest consequence. Stopping a cut.
4. When did anybody last measure a junior's height? A staff that records weight and not height has one number and no way of reading it, because growth and drift look identical on a scale. Growth and puberty.
5. What is in the athletes' bags, who bought it, and which batch is it? All three parts matter, and the third is the one that decides a hearing. Supplement contamination.
6. If a doping control officer arrived at training tonight, what happens? Somebody in the room needs to already know. Called for a test.
7. Has anybody checked whether a person your staff works with is serving a ban? It takes 5 minutes and almost nobody does it. Code liability.
8. Who is arranging food at the next away event, by name? In most squads the honest answer is nobody, which is how athletes end up eating whatever the venue put out that morning. The away tournament.
9. What does the room hear when somebody misses weight? Whatever it hears, it is being taught something, and the lesson lands harder than anything said deliberately. Gym culture.

The blanks are always in the same three places

Nobody owns it. Nothing was written. Nothing gets measured between competitions.

Those three account for almost every squad-level failure I have been asked to look at, and they are unrelated to how good the coaching is. A gym producing national champions can have all three, and frequently does, because the qualities that make somebody an excellent coach have nothing to do with keeping a register.

The fix is boring, which is why it does not get done. One name against each recurring decision. One sheet per athlete. Five minutes a week per person.

Which system each athlete is competing under

A staff often has athletes entered under two or three different rulebooks in the same season, and a plan that is correct in one of them is wrong in the others. What changes is the recovery window, and the window decides how much a bad weight class can cost.

• Boxing weighs the day before, and as many as four separate instruments may cap what goes back on
• MMA weighs early the morning before, with nothing in the contest rules limiting the refill
• Olympic wrestling, judo and amateur boxing bring the scale back, either every morning or on the second day
• BJJ weighs minutes before the first match, in the gi, with no window at all
• Muay Thai and kickboxing each contain two opposite systems inside the same sport

The number underneath all the others

Weight is the visible variable and it is not the useful one. What sits beneath it is how much energy is left after training has taken its share, measured against fat-free mass.

An athlete can hold a stable weight for 11 weeks and be underfuelled throughout, and the scale will not show it. The thresholds, and what falls first when the number drops, are in how many calories a fighter needs in camp. There is a calculator that takes about a minute per athlete.

Run it once at the start of a camp for everybody. The results will surprise you in both directions, and the heavyweights will surprise you most.

Where the exposure is the staff's, not the athlete's

Anti-doping briefings in gyms are almost entirely about what happens to the fighter. The part that goes unmentioned is that the Code reaches the people in the corner too, by a different route and with sanctions of the same length.

You will never be asked for a sample. That is the whole of the protection, and it is narrower than it sounds. What actually applies to a coach sets out the articles, including the one about staying quiet.

Alongside it, four things worth briefing before anybody needs them: which body actually governs your athletes, why whereabouts failures end careers with no positive test involved, when an exemption has to be applied for, and where a product is allowed to come from.

Juniors, where nothing is reversible

For wrestling rooms specifically, the 2026-27 high school weight classes and the certification floor that sets the lowest legal class are on one page.

Every other section on this page describes a decision that can be corrected next season. This one does not.

Bone is built to a ceiling during a window a few years wide, and an athlete held in a deficit through it is spending something he cannot earn back later. Growth and puberty covers the timing, and adolescent girls covers the route that the standard literature on gymnasts and runners does not describe.

Three shorter pieces to have on hand: the case against cutting under 18, the signs worth watching for, and a page written to be handed to a parent.

The week away, which is where plans fail

A camp can be run badly for 6 weeks and recovered. A tournament week cannot.

Most of what goes wrong on a trip is logistical rather than nutritional: scales that disagree with each other, a buffet with nobody watching it, eight athletes on eight different schedules and a kitchen working to one. Taking a squad to a tournament goes through it in order.

Around it sit the specific cases. Catering and control at away camps. Eating between contests when the running order keeps moving. Time zones, and readings that cannot be trusted at altitude. Where a fasting month falls inside the season, the schedule bends around it rather than the group being split in two. Whether a given athlete fasts at all is not a coaching question, and the person to settle it with is whoever advises him on his faith.

A last note on what this produces

Staff sometimes read a page like this and hear a demand to be stricter. It is the opposite request.

Almost everything described here raises the weight athletes compete at, widens the margins, and removes reasons to hurry. The mark of a squad that runs it is simple: fewer people fail at a scale, fewer arrive at a final unable to think, and somebody can answer a parent without having to remember.

Where a programme wants that written down and adopted rather than reinvented each camp, that is a different conversation.