8/7/2007 12:50:00 PM
Editor’s Note: Mike Moyer, 46, a former ten-year wrestling coach at George Mason, has served as full-time executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association since 1999 and among other things has worked hard to help save programs that have been dropped the past few years. In mid-August, he will meet with coaches at the NWCA convention to discuss the current impact of Title IX, APR (Academic Performance Rating, created by the NCAA to monitor academic and retention numbers) and the new method of choosing NCAA tournament qualifiers. Moyer visited with W.I.N. editor Mike Finn about what the NWCA can do to help wrestling when its being threatened on the college level. Q: Your job is to promote wrestling at a time when some programs are being dropped; most recently Eastern Illinois and Oregon. How is it going in light of these decisions? A: This has been a tough year. Some of these programs that have been dropped are surprising because for awhile we were doing very well. We have to face it. The landscape of intercollegiate athletics has changed dramatically and we have to be willing to do things differently as a sport group. Q: Why has the landscape of college athletics changed dramatically? A: There is more fiscal pressures on college campuses. The business of intercollegiate athletics is very different today than it was 30 years ago. The coaches at the college level really need the equivalent of what we call small-business CEO skills. It’s no longer enough to just go in the practice room to teach double legs and single legs. It’s all those other skills; fund-raising, marketing, promotions, public speaking. We have to make absolutely certain that our programs are conducted in a manner that are consistent with the educational values of the schools. If we look at the Academic Performance Rating, 25 of our 88 Division I programs are below the 925 threshold. That is without the roster size adjustment. Wrestling, like some other sports, has a small number of athletes on scholarship. It’s my understanding that this is the last year that roster adjustment is going to come into play. With the adjustment, there are only eight schools below the 925. But when this adjustment goes away, it’s one of those things that we have to be paying attention to. Even at the Div. II and Div. III levels where it doesn’t apply, the concept that your team is performing well academically is an important concept. Q: Is college wrestling going through a crisis now? A: I don’t want to say it is a crisis, but we are at a “T” in the road. My father’s favorite saying is that nothing stays the same. Things get bigger or smaller. They get better or weaker. There is a lot that is good about wrestling, but we have some very real threats. At the Div. I level, this Academic Performance Rating is a very real threat. Q: Is the APR threat worse than what Title IX was? A: Title IX factors into most every decision and a lot of times it’s not the only decision. A lot of times it’s a combination of Title IX; in some cases a poorly-academic performing team; in some cases it is a team that has people in trouble off the mat. I’d say one of the skills that we need more coaches to strengthen are their public relations skills; how to form tight bonds with key decision-making people on their campus and in their community and within their alumni. Q: Wrestling has been treated like the red-headed stepchild of college sports. What can coaches do to make wrestling so valuable that administrators won’t cut it because of its value? A: The key is that we have to sell wrestling to people outside of wrestling. In some cases, we have some wrestling people who are key decision makers; like a Bob Bowlsby at Stanford. But for the most part, we have to sell wrestling to people who are key decision-making people, who, in many cases, don’t understand wrestling. The way you do that is by speaking at the Rotary Club, at the Kiwanis Club and participate in on-campus committees that even fall outside of athletics. It’s tough to expect other people on your campus to support your program if you are not going to support the things that they do. Q: Are coaches being more reactive and not pro-active? A: I think what has happened over the past 12 months has really gotten the attention of our coaches. Our (2007 convention) numbers are way up, which is very encouraging. One of the things that we are working in collaboration with the NCAA Wrestling Committee is that we are working towards the development of a strategic plan. Q: What do you mean by a specific plan? A: What we really want to do is focus on initiatives that accomplish several goals and objectives. No. 1, we want to place more emphasis on dual meets. If we are going to grow the spectator base, it’s easier to get spectators to sit through a two-hour dual meet than a two-day marathon tournament. This Academic Performance Rating is part of the strategic plan. The APR is here to stay. We are putting together a committee to really investigate what is it about the APR and how it impacts wrestling. While we try to lobby for more flexibility in the APR, we have to figure out how to live by the rules as they are currently written. Another part of a strategic plan is women’s wrestling. We now have twice as many high school women wrestling across the country as there are women rowers. Yet, at the NCAA level, we have 144 women’s rowing teams and only one women’s wrestling team. As an organization, our responsibility is to grow the number of coaching opportunities for our membership and we could virtually double it if we could get a women’s team at each school where there is a men’s team. Another part of it would be the possibility of changing the season so that we can get our premier event (the NCAA Championship) to fall outside of the March Madness. Another thing we need to address is the skin infection problem. Up in Minnesota last year, wrestling was shut down for eight days due to a widespread outbreak of herpes. Now that we have weight-management under control, the skin infection is going to become the next very real threat. The perception is just as problematic as the skin infection itself. Then of course, the other really big question to deal with is the whole NCAA qualifier allocation; this notion that we are no longer going to use historical data. We need to come up with a fair and equitable system that protects the integrity of the conferences; protects the regional representation that we’ve had in the past and also insures after regional representation that we get as many of the best wrestlers as we can to the NCAA tournament. Q: You listed many different things for coaches to debate. How can a group of coaches who have had such a hard time getting to an annual convention, sit down and figure these items out? A: That exactly explains why it is so hectic around our office now. I think a big piece of our success is getting the high-profile coaches to be our spokespeople. I’m incredibly impressed that we have a lot of high-profile coaches who have not been to the convention in quite some time, but who are registered for this year. That is certainly part of the strategy. The other part is that wrestling problems need to be solved by wrestling people and if we can’t come together and solve these issues, we will be assured that they will be solved for us by people who are not wrestling people. Hopefully, that in itself is enough motivation for coaches to have this willingness to work together. This strategic plan is going to involve a lot of different aspects to it. In order to shepherd this through the NCAA and go through layers of committees, it has to have broad-based support. Our willingness to compromise and work together has never been greater. We can’t take the position, “Well, that’s tough.” This is a lesson in diplomacy. We need to make sure we bring as much to the table as we can so that we can have broad-based support from key conferences. Q: Do wrestling coaches have the tendency to be overly-independent because they were such individuals as competitors and now it’s hard for them to think outside of their own surroundings. A: That is an element of wrestling. It is an individual sport so we are used to being out there all by ourselves and there is no one to rely on. We are trying to survive in a world where collaboration is essential. There are few places in this country that are more political than on a college campus so this willingness to work together with administrators and other coaches in other sports has never been greater. Q: The NWCA has only a handful of full-time employees. Isn’t there a perception that the organization is gigantic and should be handling this problem for wrestling? A: This is a lot bigger than what three or four people can do. We work on behalf of our coaches. It is very difficult for us to lobby the NCAA on issues if we don’t have a general consensus among our own membership. What happens is that as soon as it gets in front of a committee and if our conferences and coaches are not on board with it and the committees are comprised of conference representatives, it goes nowhere. It’s really going to require a lot of work from our critical masses out there. We have to circle the wagons and compromise. Our role here is to do a lot of the grunt work and get the facts. Once we have the facts, then we can present the facts and make informed decisions, which is one of the greatest strides we have made as an organization. We have much better data than we have ever had before. For example, we are looking at ways how we can recruit more athletes into the sport and how we retain them once we have them in the sport. Then from this expanded pool we should be able to develop more elite wrestlers. With that being said, 25 percent of the high school dual meet matches that (we) captured results on last year were forfeits. Right now, there is a lot of discussion in the high school community that the way to address that is to eliminate weight classes. But if our goal is to grow participation numbers, I’m not sure that eliminating weight classes is the answer. We now have the assessment data on 220,000 high school wrestlers so we can look if the weight classes are representing the available pool of wrestlers. It may not that we have to eliminate weight classes. We just need to adjust the weight classes. Q: Is the NCAA and its membership, especially university presidents, getting tired and fed up with wrestling’s inabilities to make decisions? A: I wouldn’t say that, but we run the risk of that happening if we are not unified in our sport. Other sports have their challenges. Football can’t agree on the Bowl Championship Series. There are emotional issues out there regardless of what the sport is. We are at a crossroads in wrestling where we need to circle the wagons and agree to support a strategic plan; one that makes sense and one that we can sell to the NCAA. The members of the NCAA wrestling committee are very capable people and we are fortunate to be able to work with them. Q: Should this debate be expanded to get more support from high school coaches? A: In our membership, we have about 8,000 coaches and only about 320 of them are college coaches. Our goal has to be: how do we lose less athletes? We have youth club programs with 150 participants, but by the time they get to high school, there are only about 15 left. We just hired Neal Turner, who will be our coaching development coordinator and working with researchers at Penn State and Missouri State. We want this to be an evidence-based program. Some of the things we are looking into is what is an appropriate age to introduce a young child to a combative sport and when is it appropriate to put him out there in competition? Q: What are the attributes of wrestling that coaches should push more that they are not? A: For sure, wrestling is one of the toughest things that you will do in life. There is the quote that “Once you have wrestled, everything else is easy.” You play baseball, you play football, you play soccer. I don’t know if you play wrestling. You wrestle because you are willing to stare some of your greatest challenges right in the eyes and are willing to walk out there all by yourself and accept the result all by yourself. I don’t know if there is greater preparation for the rest of your life than being out on a wrestling mat. Wrestling is also an accommodating sport, whether you are small, big, light or heavy. That’s a positive. It requires an awful lot of discipline and humility. You can say that all sports have benefits. My 13-year-old son plays baseball and wrestles. I asked him how does the level of anxiety when you are pitching parlay to when you are on the wrestling mat. He said it’s not even close. Q: Finally, if nothing is done to correct the problems with college wrestling, what will college wrestling look like ten years from now? A: I think we could just see pockets of wrestling and fewer programs. On the upside, where we have seen the biggest growth has been on the Div. II, Div. III and NAIA levels; schools that are more enrollment-driven. Where we’ve had the hard time getting new programs is at the Div. I level. There is very little incentive at NCAA member institutions to support broad-based programs so we have to prove our value at every school across the country where we have a team. And it’s not just the value or wins and losses. It’s value in supporting the educational mission of the school and getting the alumni back involved in the school and winning the confidence of key community leaders. It’s almost like being a manager of a division of a company. Every quarter you have to justify the existence of your division. I can’t think of any wrestling program where it’s all about the wins and losses. (You can also read this article by subscribing to W.I.N. Magazine. Either contact our office at 1-888-305-0606 or subscribe through this website by selecting the “Subscribe” section on our front page at www.win-magazine.com)
Mike Finn
WIN Magazine
W.I.N. Mike Moyer