Wrestling's Collegiate Comeback
NCWA Brings Wrestling Back To The Mats
Jim Giunta is helping to rebuild collegiate wrestling so that student-athletes today and in coming years can avoid the shock and frustration he experienced three decades ago.
When Giunta tried to walk on to the wrestling team at Texas A&M after transferring from Penn State University-New Kensington, where he wrestled on the university’s varsity team, he was in for a “real shock,” he said. “In Pennsylvania, wrestling was as strong as any other sport, and I just assumed it would be the same elsewhere. When I found out there wasn’t a wrestling program at Texas A&M, it was a real shock to realize wrestling wasn’t big everywhere.”
After learning about some smaller colleges in Dallas that were wrestling in the National Junior College Athletic Association, Giunta started a similar club program at Texas A&M, but it wasn’t enough for Giunta. “I wanted to compete at a higher level, so it was frustrating,” he said.
Giunta didn’t realize that as frustrated as he was then with the lack of collegiate varsity wrestling programs, he would become even more frustrated years later as those limited programs dwindled. “During wrestling’s heyday in the ‘70s, there were more than 800 wrestling programs competing in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA),” he said. “Now there are approximately half that.”
One-fourth of today’s 400 or so collegiate wrestling programs are the result of the National Collegiate Wrestling Association (NCWA), which Giunta founded in 1997 with Lelan Brotherman and David Hadde. The 501(c) nonprofit organization developed from the Texas Interscholastic Wrestling Association, whose goal was to grow wrestling on a high school level in Texas; as a result, wrestling was regulated as an official high school sport in 1998, Giunta said.
Similarly, the NCWA is “committed to providing and expanding athletic leadership opportunities through involvement in collegiate-style wrestling,” according to NCWA materials. Giunta explained the organization’s mission simply as “creating an opportunity for kids to pursue their passion of wrestling and take leadership in it.”
Approximately 250,000 male and 5,000 female high school wrestlers are competing on high school teams today, Giunta said. “A reasonable estimate would be that half of them would choose to attend college and wrestle for their college team if they could. That would mean we would need more than 4,000 collegiate wrestling programs to satisfy the potential need for kids to go to college and pursue their passion of wrestling.”
Chances Instead Of Choices
Before NCWA, many high school wrestlers had to choose between attending the college of their choice and attending a college with a wrestling program, Giunta said. “We wanted to create an opportunity in which students wouldn’t have to make that choice.”
In the NCWA’s first year, 21 teams competed in the national championships. Today, there are 160 NCWA collegiate wrestling programs nationwide, with approximately 25 new programs being added each year.
Giunta estimated that 30 percent of NCWA programs are entirely student-run with no assistance from faculty, administration or alumni.
“These programs are designed to help students develop as leaders rather than as wrestlers,” Giunta said. “They have to learn how to write a charter, how to give a presentation to administrators, how to set a budget and work within that budget, and how to book travel. Our program is really a great personal [leadership] plan with wrestling attached. Wrestling is just the catalyst for leadership.”
Giunta said having an NCWA program is as beneficial to schools as to kids. “The NCWA wrestling program can help attract students to that school who perhaps wouldn’t have considered the school initially because it didn’t offer wrestling.
“Really, we can start a wrestling program at any college,” Giunta added. “All of the procedures for starting a wrestling program or other collegiate program are published and available to everyone. The NCWA provides a national governing body for competition, communication and promotion of collegiate-style wrestling.”
Good Timing For ‘Remarkable’ Growth
NCWA teams can compete against NCAA, NAIA and teams from other collegiate divisions throughout the regular season, Giunta said. After the regular season, NCWA teams compete in National Qualifiers tournaments for each of the NCWA’s seven conferences; teams qualifying for the NCWA National Championships in March are announced the third week in January. The NCWA National Championships feature a 32-man bracket in 11 weight classes, Giunta said.
One of the teams that will compete in the 2008 National Qualifiers is Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio, which joined NCWA in 2005 with Head Coach Terry Mundrick and Assistant Coaches Matt Jacobs and Ken White. Mundrick and White’s sons wrestled together at Bowling Green High School, and “we recognized the dearth of collegiate wrestling opportunities in Northwest Ohio, an area with a strong high school wrestling tradition,” White said. “BGSU’s varsity wrestling program ended in the early ‘80s, and we knew there were some very talented wrestlers on the BGSU campus who thought they wouldn’t have a chance to wrestle in college. We set about to change all of that.”
The NCWA program at BGSU was established within six months and practices soon followed. In those three short years, BGSU has produced 16 wrestlers to the NCWA National Qualifers. White is proud of what the NCWA has accomplished not only for BGSU but also for wrestling overall. “What Giunta and the NCWA have done for collegiate wrestling during a time of marked decline throughout the country is remarkable,” he said. “The NCWA has given so many young men the chance to participate in the sport they love in unprecedented numbers. Thanks to Jim and the NCWA, collegiate wrestling is flourishing [beyond expectations].”
Giunta credits volunteers and good timing for the NCWA’s success and growth, explaining that the NCWA came along around the same time as the Internet. “Without our 100-percent volunteer organization and the Internet, the NCWA could not have happened. Both have helped keep our costs normally associated with staff, mailings, registration and eligibility down to next to nothing.”
The NCWA website (www.ncwa.net) includes real-time rankings and statistics with a link to www.wrestlingrankings.net, where athletes, coaches and parents can track the high school standings. Giunta said the free service is valuable to both those concerned with high school wrestling and the NCWA. “We get a lot out of it because high school students can see the points, then visit our website to find out about NCWA and how to start an NCWA collegiate wrestling program.
“There’s no reason a college or university should say no to an NCWA student-run program,” Giunta added. “It doesn’t cost the school anything to speak of because the students raise the funds to support the program, it’s a great way to attract students, and it creates a good environment for learning.”
Giunta hopes to establish 300 NCWA programs nationwide by 2012 and, ultimately, a collegiate wrestling program at every college and university in the country. “We just want kids to have a chance, so we’re giving them a chance through the NCWA.”