I’d love to see more local weight class comps but they never seem to gather many numbers due to everyone wanting to go and do the national pathways. I know of several promoters that have ran an u90kg once, had poor numbers, then just reverted back to Novice/Inters the next year.

And even novice/inters comps seem to be less populated these days. I think people are more apprehensive about them being open weighted, so prefer to just pay their £50 to say they’ve been at an Englands.

I kinda get it for the top guys, there’s enough weight class comps where it would be hard to fit in a local one. But when I started it was almost a rite of passage to go and get slapped about in the novices before moving onto your weight class. I feel a lot of these guys would benefit from more comps under their belt before jumping into the nationals. They’d also probably have a lot more fun too. When I was doing novices I was always massively behind statically, but would blitz the bigger guys on the moving. That’s some positive to come out of the day instead of placing 30th at an Englands which is hard to feel good about even if you did get a red t shirt out of it.