Coaches revolt as Flo retires Trackwrestling classic view
Seth Duckworth started it, Adam Tirapelle called the move tone deaf, and MatSavant brought receipts from the browser network tab.
Flo retiring Trackwrestling's classic view set off the loudest argument of the week among coaches and tournament people. MatBoy (@seth_duckworth) called the classic view "the only thing that's actually functional and helpful" and said almost everyone he knows hates the new stuff. Adam Tirapelle called it a tone deaf decision and said to call 100 wrestling people and count how many use the new system, with his over/under set at 1.
MatSavant pulled the network logs
The most detailed complaint came from MatSavant, who wrote a long reply addressed to @SpeyWrestle that opened with "OK, since you asked..." His argument is not about features. It is that the site does not load in a gym.
By his numbers, Trackwrestling is old-school JSP in frames and loads about half a megabyte of its own JavaScript, while Flo's new site loads about 14 MB of uncompressed JavaScript for an event page, roughly 28 times more. He says that is fine on a laptop with fiber and fatal on a phone in a packed rural gym. He also counted about 500 requests to 120 to 150 different domains on a single page load, five times or more what he says most sites aim for, with every one of those fighting over the same weak connection.
He flagged a caching problem too. On the page he checked, his own state tournament, Flo's JavaScript files have versioned names but are served with a 10-second cache lifetime, so his phone re-checks all 136 files with the server every time he opens the page instead of reusing what it already has. He said marking those files long-lived and immutable at the CDN would fix it, and that the HTML page itself is not being compressed. All of it, he said, came from about ten minutes in the browser's network tab.
What the coaches say they actually want
MatSavant's practical version of the complaint is the part that lands. He described spending the whole day trying to figure out when and where his wrestlers are up because the site will not load, with five guys on deck and no dashboard, flying blind. He credited the text messages for saving him.
His earlier post argued the right answer was to fix classic view on the back end and keep the interface the same rather than force redirects to Flo's bracketing interface. He also asked directly for @SpeyWrestle's honest opinion on the decision and called it a board room call made by people who are not in a gymnasium for 12 hours on a Saturday.
Nobody from Flo has posted a public explanation of why classic view is going away in the sources here. What to watch is whether @SpeyWrestle, who asked for the feedback, answers the load-time numbers.
Call 100 wrestling people and find out how many use the “new” system. I have the over/under at 1.
Honestly, we just want it to work.
The classic view is the only thing that's actually functional and helpful.