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Amateur Wrestling Reports

Walk-ons play integral part in success of college wrestling programs

College wrestling programs across the country will soon embark on the 2016-17 season with the first official practice less than three weeks away. Coaches will finalize their team rosters and scholarship money will get dispersed throughout the team of wrestlers. Team rosters will also include many non-scholarship student-athletes known as walk-ons. A fully-funded college wrestling program is allotted 9.9 scholarships. “With 9.9 scholarships, a walk-on can be very valuable to the program,” said University of Pittsburgh head wrestling coach Jason Peters.Many college wrestling rosters have 30 or more wrestlers. “Not everybody can be on money, so we need walk-ons each and every year to balance out our recruiting classes,” said Rutgers head wrestling coach Scott Goodale. “They’re a huge part of our program. We’ve been fortunate enough where guys have stuck with it and end up being contributors to our program.”
Types of walk-ons
There are two types of walk-ons in college wrestling programs. The distinction between the two types of non-scholarship student-athletes comes in how the wrestler lands in the program.
“A recruited walk-on is someone you went after and want,” said Goodale, who guided the Scarlet Knights to a 15th-place finish at the 2016 NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships. “You develop a relationship with that wrestler. It just happens that it’s a money thing. It’s a scholarship thing. Maybe you don’t want to put all this money into a certain weight class. Or maybe you just don’t know if that wrestler is a scholarship kid right now, and you don’t want to take that chance, but they’re dying to wrestle in your program.
“Then there are just guys who just want to try out. They wrestled in high school. Maybe they didn’t recruited, but are going to come to your school because it’s their dream school. They want to try out. We have a couple guys doing that right now.”
Rest of the story at http://matbossapp.hs-sites.com/blog/walk-ons-play-integral-part-in-success-of-college-wrestling-programs?mc_cid=4bc10e834a&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

October 19, 2016 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Wrestling returns to campus after a 38-year absence

Increased enrollment at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, will soon bring two new additions to the college’s athletics offerings: a wrestling team and a women’s bowling team.
Wrestling returns to campus after a 38-year absence. Penn State Behrend offered NCAA wrestling from 1967 until 1978, using Erie Hall for practices and home matches. Wrestlers will again use that space beginning in the fall of 2017.
Pennsylvania has long been a dominant force in the sport: No other state has had more NCAA programs or produced more All-Americans in the last 50 years. Two wrestlers have been inducted into Penn State Behrend’s Athletics Hall of Fame. An active club team has continued to represent the college. The addition of a formal Division III team will elevate the sport at Penn State Behrend and provide an opportunity for the region’s high school wrestlers to continue to compete locally, said Brian Streeter, director of athletics for the college.
…. “Both sports reward students who are driven by individual success. Those tend to be good students who are determined to achieve, both in and out of the classroom, and who have the time-management skills to make that happen.” Penn State Behrend’s student-athletes compete at the NCAA’s Division III level. The college fields 24 teams and has for the past 12 years won the AMCC Presidents Cup, which honors the top overall athletics program in the conference. Those student-athletes also excel in the classroom: Sixty-three percent of the college’s student-athletes maintain a cumulative grade-point average of 3.0 or higher.
From Penn State Behrend College News

October 19, 2016 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment