STATE COLLEGE — Edinboro athletic director and two-time Olympic champion Bruce Baumgartner sat by the pool at the South Atherton Street Ramada Inn on Sunday afternoon and discussed the conundrum known as wrestling.
Less than 30 feet away, dozens of wrestlers sweated through a summer workout in the hotel’s atrium.
Many of the wrestlers are Pennsylvania natives, and one of Baumgartner’s Olympic teammates conceded the campers are immune to the challenges facing the sport.
“We’re very fortunate, “said Ken Chertow, a former Penn State All-American and Olympic qualifier conducting a two-week camp at the Ramada Inn. “The Pennsylvania wrestling community is somewhat sheltered from the problems because we have such a rich tradition.”
In Pennsylvania, a young wrestler can walk into a camp or practice and bump into an Olympian or NCAA champion.
The men, along with committed children, clever coaches and dedicated parents, keep the sport prominent.
But that’s only one state.
What about others?
College wrestling lost another Division I team earlier this month when Oregon announced it will drop its program after 2007-08. The program has a budget of $629,000, a tiny amount in the Phil Knight-funded world of Oregon athletics.
The Ducks produced a national champion last year. Now, their wrestlers are scrambling to find somewhere else to end their careers.
This scramble will extend beyond Oregon’s practice room. Oregon will only have two wrestling programs – Portland State and Oregon State – and neighboring Washington lost its major programs years ago.
“It hurts in a lot of different ways, “Baumgartner said. “It takes away opportunities from kids to go into college from high school. There are certain kids that will say, ‘If I can’t go onto it in college, why should I stick it out in high school?’ It also hurts because those colleges won’t be producing wrestling enthusiasts.”
Pennsylvania has no trouble producing wrestling enthusiasts. The state features 35 NCAA programs, including 14 at the Division I level. Baumgartner and Chertow are high-profile examples of men who contribute to the sport’s stability in Pennsylvania.
“When college programs produce people that go out in the workforce, they bring a little bit of wrestling enthusiasm with them, “Baumgartner said. “The Pennsylvania schools produce a lot of education majors. They go out and they are a high school assistant coach and then they become the high school head coach. The state of Oregon has two schools that wrestle. Not a lot is going back into the community.”
Oregon isn’t the only state in danger of losing wrestling enthusiasts.
Eastern Illinois dropped its program earlier this year. Fresno State, which has produced 2004 Olympic silver medalist Stephen Abas, cut its program last summer. James Madison decided to eliminate 10 sports programs, including wrestling, last year.
Even Pennsylvania isn’t invincible to the cuts. Slippery Rock dropped its program in 2006.
The cuts always hurt. They also raise an obvious question: How does a sport with more than 250,000 high school participants, almost 10,000 varsity teams and a thriving summer camp scene struggle to maintain major programs?
“That’s a good question, “said Chertow, whose State College camp will attract more than 500 participants. “Our wrestling coaches need to focus more on just Xs and Os. They need to market our sport, get their sports information people working for them to promote our sport and get their marketing people to get more people in the seats.
“Most of the programs that get dropped are very below average programs where the coaches haven’t been committed to the promotion and organization of the program. Our powerhouse programs aren’t getting cut.”
Baumgartner has observed the sport from every side. He won a NCAA title and participated in four Olympics. He coached the Fighting Scots from 1991-97. He has spent the past decade as Edinboro’s athletic director.
His current job forced him to eliminate baseball and men’s tennis earlier this decade. Baumgartner said the $629,000 Oregon will save by cutting wrestling represents a significant chunk of a smaller school’s budget.
“We don’t spend that on football, “he said. “For Oregon, my guess that is somewhat a reasonable amount of money to come up with if they wanted to. We had to cut some sports at Edinboro and it was based on the availability to get quality athletes, budget, resources, facilities and weather. You take a lot of things into consideration when you drop a sport.”
Baumgartner added that cutting wrestling doesn’t make a lot of sense in his area.
His school has placed in the Top 10 of the past two NCAA Championships, and it conducts three weeks of wrestling camps.
Baumgartner spent Sunday at a place and works at school where the conundrum seems miles away.
Guy Cipriano is a sports writer at the Centre Daily Times. He can be reached at 231-4643 or [email protected].
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