The writing has been on the wall since July 13, 2007: Oregon’s wrestling program will be discontinued after it completes the 2007-08 season, which ends March 3 when the University hosts the Pacific-10 Conference Championships at McArthur Court. Barring an 11th-hour reprieve, the 54-year-old program will bow out, the mats will be rolled up, and Oregon wrestling will end.
Throughout the last eight months, one question has lingered unanswered: Why cut Oregon wrestling now?
“It’s something that’s been considered over a long, long time,” Neal Zoumboukos, an associate athletic director at Oregon, said. With regards to the “very difficult” decision to cut the wrestling program, “events and certain factors all materialized at this point of time,” Zoumboukos said. “Any one of those factors itself was not a reason to drop wrestling, but they were a combination of a number of factors.”
According to Zoumboukos, there are four reasons why the Oregon wrestling team is getting cut: the lack of a dedicated wrestling facility, the lack of a significant wrestling fanbase in the city, the possibility to capitalize on an investment, and the lack of support from other Pac-10 and Division I programs for the sport of wrestling. “These factors have been out there independently before, but they all lined up last summer and a decision was made that wrestling would be dropped,” Zoumboukos said. Contrary to common belief, the decision to remove wrestling is not a Title IX issue; Oregon qualifies for Title IX under history of expansion of opportunities for women, which doesn’t require removing men’s sports.

A sport with no home on campus

For just over a year, the wrestling team has been practicing in a converted basketball court at the Student Rec Center.
“As the number of sports we have has grown and different programs have increased their numbers, we needed to expand the athletic treatment center,” Zoumboukos said. The former wrestling room was space the treatment facility now uses, and when they were moved out the wrestlers were promised a new space.
“When we were told we were moving from our old wrestling room,” junior wrestler Jeremy McLaughlin said, “I remember asking (former athletic director) Bill Moos what our plans were for a wrestling room. He looked me straight in the eyes and promised we would be building the best facility in the Pac-10 for us.
“And that’s an excuse that we can’t have a program anymore?”
“The sacrifices we were willing to make for them … they kind of turned their backs on us,” redshirt senior wrestler Joey Lucas added.
The Save Oregon Wrestling campaign planned to find a location on campus for a new dedicated facility. Zoumboukos did not think that the current amount of money raised would be enough for a “first-class” athletics facility, and was not confident a wrestling room built in stages would be adequate, either.

Budgets and fanbases

The athletic department is also not confident that there are available revenue streams in Eugene and Springfield for the team.
“We do not see that in wrestling,” Zoumboukos said. “When you started comparing that to the potential for baseball, there was a significant difference in that as well.”
However, S.O.W. has raised more than $2.5 million – and Oregon head coach Chuck Kearney believes it could be more with the University’s support.
“Our department is striving to be run like a business,” Kearney said, “If somebody would come forward and say, ‘If wrestling can support itself, we’ll reinstate it,’ our fundraising efforts would skyrocket.”
“We don’t even want money from them, all we want is their sponsorship,” Lucas said.
Without paying for a facility, both Kearney and former head coach Ron Finley (who heads the Save Oregon Wrestling campaign) estimate that the money raised to this point could fund the team for three or four seasons.
“If money is truly an issue in the athletic department, why cut a sport as inexpensive as wrestling is?” Kearney said.
However, the athletic department doesn’t see fanbase or revenue opportunities in the urban Willamette Valley.
“There is certainly an excellent fanbase for prep wrestling in central Oregon and eastern Oregon and southern Oregon,” Zoumboukos said. “They’re hotbeds for prep wrestling.” But Zoumboukos hasn’t seen that translate into improved attendance figures for the Ducks.
“The Save Oregon Wrestling program did a masterful job promoting the All-Star Classic,” Zoumboukos said, referring to the Nov. 19 event that featured top college wrestlers from around the country. “Somehow that didn’t get carried over to the (Oregon) wrestling program this year.”
“I find it borderline offensive when that argument is used,” Kearney said. The former Oregon wrestler pointed to the dual meet against Oklahoma State, a matchup that took place on Feb. 8 – the same day as district tournaments for Oregon high school wrestlers around the state. “Those district tournaments, the gyms were full,” Kearney said.
While Kearney agrees that Oregon teams should seek donations to further help the athletic department, he still doesn’t feel that college athletics should be driven by the bottom line.
“We’ve got to get our administration to understand that we’re in the kid business, and that it’s not about revenue streams,” he said.

Adequate competition?

The Pacific-10 Conference is one of only four of the Bowl Championship Series conferences that carries wrestling, and only four teams that participate in other Pac-10 sports – Arizona State, Stanford, Oregon State and the Ducks – sponsor wrestling.
However, the Atlantic Coast Conference only has six schools with wrestling, and one of the strongest conferences in the nation – the Big 12 – has five. Also, the last time a Pac-10 school dropped wrestling was in 1986, when Washington State cut its team.
However, wrestling as an NCAA Division I sport is definitely on a downward trend. In the period since 1982, wrestling has gone from having more than 50 percent of D-I schools sponsor the sport to just under 30 percent.
Within the context of men’s sports in the NCAA, though, that’s not a huge anomaly; 239 Division I sports have been dropped since that time, and out of Olympic sports, only indoor and outdoor track and field and cross country have grown in that span. Men’s swimming has fallen at a similar rate as wrestling, for example.
Wrestling is as popular as ever in the state at the prep level, though – with more than 4,600 competitors at the high school level in Oregon last year, it’s the third most popular OSAA winter sport behind boy’s and girl’s basketball. 14 out of Oregon’s 18 wrestlers are from the state of Oregon. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, about 700 more high schools sponsored wrestling in 2006-07 than did so 10 years ago; in that time, more than 33,000 more high school students are wrestling. The total number of students wrestling nationwide in 2006-07 is also the highest it’s been in 25 years.
More than anything, the fight to save Oregon’s wrestling program will come down to desire. Wrestlers want to save a sport that is becoming more popular at youth levels, and is strong in the state; the athletic department wants to cut a sport it sees as having diminishing Division I opportunities and no dedicated facility.
“If we wanted to keep wrestling, we could keep wrestling,” Kearney said. The wrestlers aren’t bitter about the new sports arriving next season, but disagree with dropping wrestling.
“I’m excited that baseball’s coming, I’m excited that competitive cheerleading’s coming,” McLaughlin said. “I’m excited to see those options, that diversity amongst sports, but just re
ally hate to see the University do something I think they’re really going to look back on and go, ‘What did we do?’”
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