SoCon wrestling holds it niche

There was a time when the South was rife with college wrestling programs.

The Southeastern Conference was making waves on a national level with burgeoning, big-budget programs at Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Georgia Tech was a region power and Tampa had a good program.

Chris Bono, UTC’s 34-year-old coach, doesn’t remember it.

That era was the 1970s and pre-Title IX, the federal government’s equal opportunity program for female athletes.

Since the passage of Title IX on June 23, 1972, more than 450 collegiate wrestling programs have been eliminated. At one time there were nine college wrestling programs in Tennessee; now there is one Division I program. Georgia had as many as four; Florida had 13. Today there is one (Kennesaw State) between the two.

James Madison in Virginia and Fresno (Calif.) State dropped wrestling in recent years. Another Division I program will be gone after this year’s NCAA tournament. Oregon announced in July that it was going to discontinue wrestling, and a campaign to save it, despite the raising of $2.7 million, appears to be wasted effort.

“It’s sad,” Bono said. “Any time we start losing programs, you’re taking an opportunity away from kids to participate in the oldest sport in the world. I don’t think it’s the start of another trend, and I’m not concerned about UTC. Our administration is supporting us very well. We’re doing a good job competitively, we’re now graduating kids and our APR is improving every day.”

The Southern Conference may not see growth any time soon, but its coaches feel their programs are safe.

According to wrestling proponents in Georgia, wrestling is the sixth most popular of 14 Georgia High School Association boys’ sports; it has more than 6,200 participants.

Despite those numbers and a resolution introduced in the Georgia House of Representatives, there is no plan to add wrestling at Southern Conference member Georgia Southern.

“There was some talk back in the fall,” GSU athletic director Sam Baker said. “At some point they asked the Division I schools to do a survey to see what it would cost to do it. When you’re talking about adding facilities and coaches and all the things that go with the sport, it was a pretty big number.

“I kind of put it in neutral (at conference gatherings) when wrestling comes up,” Baker added. “With any school that has football, then because of the numbers there isn’t an equivalent sport on the women’s side. It’s based on participation rates. When we do get ready to add another sport, which isn’t being discussed right it, it probably would be another women’s sport.”

And while wrestling is also enjoying a growth spurt among North Carolina high schools and North Carolina and N.C. State have scholarshipped programs, Western Carolina athletic director Chip Smith indicated wrestling won’t be in Culhowee any time soon.

“As you may know, we recently added softball to the intercollegiate sports we sponsor. We do not have plans to add any more sports in the near future,” he said.

Still, the Southern Conference appears to be six-team solid.

“I feel very strongly that wrestling is going to grow and survive in the South,” Davidson coach Bob Patnesky said.

Questions about the past caused Appalachian State coach Bob Mance to pause. He recalls “the good ol’ days,” days when coaches such as UTC’s Jim Morgan would pack a van with wrestlers and peanut butter sandwiches and hit the road.

Mance used to annually pack up his teams and head for the Sunshine Open in Florida.

“We’d go for a week and wrestle in the tournament and then maybe wrestle a couple of teams from up North, Navy or Boston College or somebody like that,” he said. “We slept in tents on a football field. We used to rent the lobby at a fraternity house. They usually had 10 or 11 couches in them, or we’d take air mattresses.”

Now there is no one to wrestle in Florida.

“There used to be five or six teams plus those that traveled down there,” Mance said, “but I think the wave of drops is gone. You’re going to see more adding than dropping from now on. The process to continue going lower is going to swing.

“People are eventually going to understand that equality has been met and that you can’t mandate that people want to participate. You can mandate opportunity. Women are given opportunities and I want that, but it shouldn’t take away from the men. And it isn’t that the budgets aren’t there. Money has increased four-five fold.”

Patnesky was victimized by the mandates that followed Title IX’s passing. As a high school senior in Pittsburgh, Pa., he signed a scholarship with Syracuse. School officials there announced after he arrived that they had decided to discontinue wrestling. He said he could have stayed on scholarship at Syracuse but decided to transfer to West Virginia because of his love of the sport and his personal goals.

It wasn’t Title IX that Patnesky resented but the school officials.

“The big thing was the administration knew before I signed my letter of intent that they were going to drop the program, but they didn’t tell anybody. It could have ruined my whole career,” he said. “But I don’t see Oregon dropping wrestling having any effect at Davidson because of the support from the administration and the alumni, and I don’t think it will cause any problems in the Southern Conference.”