There is a television show for the biggest loser, and fitness centers continue to enjoy good attendance even in a sagging economy. Calorie counting may be bigger than ever.
Nowhere is it more serious, though, than in the sport of wrestling, where weight loss is dictated and coaches can be fined if their athletes don’t follow exacting guidelines.
“As long as there are weigh-ins, weight-cutting is going to be a part of the sport,” said Heath Eslinger, wrestling coach at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a former champion Mocs wrestler who also coached on the high school level at Cleveland.
Coaches accept the concept of weight-loss guidelines but take issue with the cumbersome control programs that have been adopted by the National Wrestling Coaches Association. They say it is an administrative nightmare, now adopted by numerous high school athletic associations, and even puts a financial burden on programs.
“I don’t deal with that stuff,” Cleveland coach Eric Phillips said. “I have an assistant [Thomas Queen] who teaches physics. He figures it out for us.”
The NWCA system dictates a wrestler’s minimum weight and also how quickly he can reach that minimum. The initial test to make that determination costs $10 per wrestler. A second test, which checks body fat and body fluid, costs $25. A third test or appeal costs $125 plus the cost of traveling to the test site in Murfreesboro.
“I understand some of the weight controls, but so much of it amounts to liability protection against any [health] issues that might arise,” Soddy-Daisy coach Steve Henry said. “The whole plan is a knee-jerk reaction to three deaths at the college level several years ago. There have not been any deaths in wrestling at the high school level ever.”
Henry also pointed out that wrestling is the only sport in which the competitors are subjected by rules to skin and fingernail inspections.
“I often wonder why there aren’t weight checks for football for guys that are too big and are at risk, and it’s just as easy to pick up a skin disease in basketball as wrestling,” Henry said.
One of the primary objections coaches have is the administrative tasking. It takes hours to administrate the program and make sure everyone stays within the rules.
“The system has created a monster of paperwork, exact monitoring of kids’ weights,” McCallie coach Gordon Connell said. “If a wrestler is [losing weight], his coach must calculate one-seventh of 1.5 percent [of his body weight] daily,” “It has clearly made wrestling the most difficult sport to coach outside of the competing area.”
Cleveland’s weight guru, Queen, is a former head wrestling coach. He spends at least an hour per day on the Blue Raiders’ weight-descent program, not counting entering team and individual scores into the NWCA site. It gets easier, he said, after wrestlers gain a two-pound allowance on Jan. 1.
“Prior to Christmas when kids are working down, you have to figure what they need to weigh on Tuesday in order to wrestle at their desired weight on Friday,” Queen said. “You are realistically tracking it daily down to the 10th of a pound.”
After every wrestler has taken the initial weight test and learns how much weight he can lose per week, Queen takes it a step further. He has incorporated a team spreadsheet to calculate how much each wrestler can lose daily.
After every weigh-in before dual meets or tournaments, each wrestler’s descent plan is automatically recalculated. There is no calculation for difference in metabolisms.
“Anyone on a given morning will weigh four or five pounds less than some other days,” Connell said. “In wrestling, a person to whom that happens has committed a violation. I see few positives [to the system].”
Colleges go by the same rules, but college coaches usually are dealing with more mature athletes.
“I’m only weighing in 10 guys and wrestling once a week, so it’s much harder on high school guys who are [competing] two or three times per week,” Eslinger said. “If it was up to me, I’d say you set a kid’s minimum weight class and that’s the rule — safest minimum weight he can go. It’s impossible to follow a descent plan exactly. You cannot perfectly lose 1.4 pounds per week. You might lose a pound one week and five pounds the next.”
Eslinger’s wrestlers know how to read labels and count calories, and they know how many calories it takes to lose a pound.
“When you can take a 16-year-old and he will deny himself certain food groups or intake, that’s a positive thing,” he said. “There are flaws in the system, but I don’t know of a system without flaws.”
Henry and others don’t like the fact that they have lost some of their ability to maneuver for certain opponents.
“If you look at the big picture, it’s no longer line them up and go at it,” Henry said. “We aren’t going to get rid of weight-loss procedures, because somebody needs to save face. The concept has been ingrained, but we need to find an alternative because so much of this was knee-jerk reaction and so much of [the change] is cosmetic.”