Women’s Wrestling to Add Positive Impact

Last week on November 6th UWSP announced that they will be adding women’s wrestling as a complement to the men’s and women’s competitive sports programs. The sport will begin in the fall of 2019 and will put UWSP at the forefront of the sport as the university will be the first public institution in the Midwest to offer women’s wrestling and the 50th university in the country to host a varsity team.

Women’s wrestling has become one of the fastest-growing sports in the country, UWSP’s director of athletics Brad Duckworth says that there has been a huge demand for the sport and it led to the decision to add it. “Currently there are 16 thousand girls that wrestle on a high school team in the country. There’s a lot more demand than there is opportunity right now so that was one of the first drivers.”

In 1994 only 800 girls were wrestling at the high school level. In 2018 there were over 16,000 girls wrestling at the high school level and there are 14 states that have state championships for girls.

Mr. Duckworth said that it just made sense to add the program to UWSP, “the second piece was, we have a coach, a very well-established, national level coach. We have a mat, we have a wrestling room. We have the infrastructure and we have the demand.”

UWSP men’s wrestling coach John Johnson will also coach the women’s program which intends to join and compete in the Women’s Collegiate Wrestling Association (WCWA).

“I think adding sports continues to do what the university’s been asked to do right now. Help with enrollment, help with retention, and graduate students. We do that in athletics very well.” The university has been looking for ways to improve its financial status and Mr. Duckworth believes this will help with that. “The tuition alone generated by our student-athletes is over 4 million annually and that doesn’t include residential living, dining services, segregated fees, all the other things that our student-athletes just like every other student pays.”

Head wrestling coach Johnny Johnson agrees, saying that adding women’s wrestling will bring in more money for UWSP. “When we start bringing students on campus that normally wouldn’t be coming to school here but they’re coming for women’s wrestling now we’re going to be adding tuition dollars that are going to be coming into the university. Not only will we be bringing in girls from the state of Wisconsin but we’re going to be bringing girls from Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan. So we will be bringing in tuition dollars that are either Midwest exchange or out of state.”

UWSP has over 600 student-athletes and in Duckworth’s opinion, many might not have attended the university if the university didn’t have those sports teams.

The six-year graduation rate of student-athletes is 81%, which is about 17% higher than the general student population according to Duckworth. The director of athletics says that UWSP athletics “will continue to be passionate about gender equity and athletics and right now this is an opportunity.”

Coach Johnson does not think that there will be big differences between the men’s and women’s teams. “There’s gonna be differences just because of the gender difference will be a little bit different. The style isn’t so far off that how we teach technique will be a lot different, it’ll be pretty similar but the rules are a little different so those will be some changes. Aside from that I think, you know the success of our program for the men’s side has been creating a culture where these guys are like a family and they’re there for each other and they set very high goals for themselves and they walk into the room with the intention to work hard every day to be able to reach those goals but we really push a team concept because that’s what collegiate and high school wrestling is about. I don’t think that that will change from the women’s side that’s the same culture I can create for the women’s team too.”

Coach Johnson and Duckworth both think that adding women’s wrestling could benefit the men’s wrestling program. Johnson said “I think it’ll be a positive for both programs, one of the things is that we will have coaches that will be able to work with both programs as well. I don’t think it’ll inhibit anything that we’re doing on the men’s side, I think in some situations that it’ll get us some different opportunities for competition for both teams in the same venue.”

The men’s wrestling team is standing behind the decision to add the team, Johnson said “I think that they’re looking forward to it and I think they embrace it as well. These guys are wrestlers and they’ve been in wrestling a long time. They also see the trend of women’s wrestling and they can see that it’s becoming an emerging sport. So I think that they respect it.”

With the addition of women’s wrestling, the athletics department will continue to evaluate all teams in three ways: classroom excellence, competitive excellence, and community impact. Mr. Duckworth said that UWSP doesn’t want to have teams just to have teams. “we strive to be competitively excellent and we’ve done that in athletics here forever historically so I anticipate that our women’s wrestling program will be very strong.”

Brooke Thurber, a junior at UWSP, will be one of the members of the new women’s wrestling team and is excited about the addition of the sport. “I wrestled since I was 5 and so when deciding where I was going to go to college I had a lot of scholarship opportunities to go out of state because they didn’t have women’s wrestling in Wisconsin yet.”

Thurber recalls coach Johnson talking to her about adding the women’s wrestling team. She said coach Johnson “put in for it and he started to get really serious about it this year. He let me know around the end of September, he was like ‘we’re probably going to go through with it and start a team’ I was like alright cool. That’s a really cool opportunity and then it finally happened.”

“It was like really exciting because it’s something that I’ve worked so hard for and I thought I was going to have to push off to the side just because Point didn’t have a women’s wrestling team and although I was working with the guys it’s not the same as the actual aspect of having a team with you so it was really exciting to like see that the sport’s expanding so much that we could start a women’s team here,” said Thurber. “Growing up I was always apart of the men’s team because there was not enough girls just to have a women’s team. There was no team aspect to it so I think it will be cool to finally be apart of a team now.”

When asked if there has been any negative feedback about adding this team Duckworth said that he has not “read a single negative response. Everything has been ‘finally’; finally a state institution, finally a public institution.” He said he was a little worried when the announcement came out thinking, “okay, what’s the next week going to look like here and are we going to end up defending our decision, I haven’t had to defend it once.” People have been more inquisitive than critical.

When it comes to wrestling matches at Stevens Point Thurber said that she and Johnson had talked about trying to get the wrestling Pointer open meaning that half of the mats next year would be women’s and the other half would be for the men.

Coach Johnson said that “there’s not a lot of teams in the Midwest that offer women’s wrestling so we’ll have to do a little bit of traveling but we’re going to try to advocate for the sport and maybe hopefully you know lead the way and trying to get other programs in the Midwest to add it.”

Duckworth said, “in times of adversity, you have to be willing to stick your neck out if you just going to take it you’re going to fold so this was an easy one. We have a coach we have a mat we have a demand. I mean you can just go right down the line. It’s like okay we can add this. This is likely not the end of our addition to sports”

About Dana Bautch

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I serve as the sports editor for The Pointer and am a sophomore studying Spanish Education

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