Maryland’s wrestling program among those awaiting a major decision

Maryland’s football and basketball players have nothing to worry about as university officials grapple with a multimillion-dollar deficit in Terrapin athletics.

But these are trying times for the school’s more than 600 student-athletes whose teams don’t turn a profit, as they wait for the recommendations of a committee that is expected to call for eliminating eight to 10 of Maryland’s 27 varsity teams in a effort to close a $4.7 million budget shortfall.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

As former wrestler Steve Hayleck put it Wednesday: “You feel like you’re waiting for a jury to come back with a verdict.”

It’s a familiar dread for Maryland’s wrestling community, which weathered the budget cuts of previous College Park administrations and survived the culling of Division I wrestling teams that often accompanied applications of the federal gender equity law known as Title IX in recent decades.

Maryland’s wrestling community has taken the lead among the Terrapins’ non-revenue teams in doing what it can to ensure its future. Maryland is the only public university in the state still to offer wrestling, apart from the Naval Academy, with programs now gone from Frostburg State, Bowie State, Morgan State, Maryland-Eastern Shore and others.

“We’ve been down this road so many times before that we know it’s better to act before than to engage in post-mortems,” said Hayleck, the wrestling representative and former president of M Club, a university sports booster group. He sent a letter last month urging wrestling alumni and supporters to contact university President Wallace Loh and the panel he established in July to recommend ways of solving the athletic department’s deficit spending with personal testimonials and revenue-generating ideas.

The panel is due to submit its report to Loh next Tuesday. Athletic Director Kevin Anderson has already informed the men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams of their likely elimination, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.

Michael W. Moyer, executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association, wrote Loh a two-page letter extolling the educational value of college wrestling and enumerating Maryland’s recent achievements, which include three of the last four ACC championships.

But it’s unclear whether the campaign has resonated with the 17-member commission. That’s because what was billed as an open process when the commission was named in July has instead has been largely secretive.

For starters, it’s unclear how much savings Loh expects — enough to cover this year’s deficit of $4.7 million or the projected deficit in 2017 of $17.6 million?

It’s unclear how many teams, if any, must be dropped to meet that target. And it’s unclear what criteria will be used to determine which teams should be dropped.

If performance on the field or in the classroom is deemed important, Maryland’s wrestling team should be on solid ground.

But if a team’s bottom line dictates its future, wrestling could be vulnerable. According to financial reports submitted to the NCAA for the fiscal year that ended in June 2010, wrestling lost $700,023. Among men’s sports, that’s less than baseball ($919,706) but more than men’s swimming ($620,889).

“Among the wrestling alumni I talk to, there’s genuine concern just because we have seen so many programs lost nationally,” Hayleck said. “And I don’t have much faith that the commission will look at our results. I think they’re just looking at spreadsheets and the projected deficit and asking, ‘Where do we cut to meet that goal?’ ”

Maryland was an ACC wrestling power in 1950s and ’60s. But according to longtime coach John McHugh, the university slashed its scholarships from the NCAA maximum of 10 to five after Title IX was passed, and performance languished. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, including athletics.

When Maryland faced a budget crisis in the mid-1990s, wrestling was among the sports in danger of being dropped. Its supporters went to work raising money through the Fear the Turtle campaign. For each $66,000 they raised, according to Hayleck, then-athletic director Debbie Yow granted them one more scholarship.

Today, Maryland wrestling has the full complement of scholarships and is a force again in the ACC. Still, McHugh wishes a deep-pocketed benefactor would emerge to fund an endowment that would bankroll wrestling scholarships forever.

“I always worry about it because a lot of good colleges that were decent in wrestling dropped it,” he said. “It depends on how the committee is going to make up its mind.”