If you haven’t noticed, the sports reporters at this newspaper have spent the past month paying a lot of attention to a sport that isn’t even supported by the Oregon athletic department anymore.
If you didn’t go to Oregon last year, or haven’t paid attention to the workings of the athletic department since 2007, the Ducks no longer wrestle at the Division I level because an announcement in July 2007 said that Oregon was reinstating baseball and starting up competitive cheer – and, by the way, was cutting wrestling.
Athletic Director Pat Kilkenny said last week in an interview with the Register-Guard newspaper that having many wrestlers find out via reports instead of learning from Kilkenny himself was “crummy.”
This newspaper covered the last season of Oregon wrestling very well with its beat reporting and gave it its due in its final season. While you may remember a certain column about wrestling that was not written by the beat reporter, you should realize that the sport was covered fairly all last season.
Then, during this school year, the sports desk thought, “Why not continue to give it its due?”
What we have tried to accomplish in the last month was a four-part series on wrestling’s impact a year after its last season. Starting with a piece on the wrestlers who have since transferred to wrestle elsewhere, we wrote about ex-head coach Chuck Kearney, the wrestlers who have stayed at Oregon to finish their educations, and yesterday, looking at how the program’s elimination has affected high school prep wrestlers and their chances at college spots.
It wasn’t as if it is a topic no one else has thought of. Case in point, the day our first piece ran, so did a good article in the Register-Guard that captured several angles about wrestling.
What mattered to us is that it was covered, period.
Something I found out through the process of talking with the reporters when they were writing the pieces and doing the research for my own was the stress it has put on other institutions, such as the high schoolers around the state, or the coaches who don’t have jobs anymore but are absorbed into the athletic department.
And for the people who it affected the most – the athletes and coaches themselves – I thought their feelings a year later were different than I might have expected. If someone cut your major, which is likely the reason you came to this school, during your career, would you be as forgiving as some of the wrestlers have been?
Having talked with reporters who have covered the team the past two years, I was happy one thing didn’t change in the year since the program was cut: their candidness. We knew the wrestlers would have strong opinions about it, and their feelings of bitterness while still being understanding toward the University athletic department only confirmed that.
I was interested to hear Kearney’s opinion, because I was surprised he talked as candidly as he did while still being an employee for the Oregon athletic department. It was expected that he wouldn’t harbor any hard feelings toward the department that cut his program because they gave him a job in the end. The way he talked about why he wanted to stay in Eugene, his connection to the city, and his struggles not being a coach anymore were something that changed the way I thought about the situation.
Most of the people involved have moved on, so maybe we should all do that now. But, moving on shouldn’t mean ignoring it ever happened, which is why we wanted to write this series.
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