TODAY'S SPORT NEEDS
'OLD SCHOOL' IDEAS
NHSCA's Ferraro shares thoughts with high schools
As executive director of the National High School Coaches Association, Bob Ferraro oversees national championships in at least 12 sports. But no sport holds a more special place in his heart than wrestling.
After all, Ferraro has spent the past 48 years in the sport. He first stepped on a wrestling mat at the age of nine. He continued competing through high school in his native Easton, Pa., and later at college at Indiana State, where he compiled a 93-4 all-time record and was a two-time All-American. In 1970, he wrestled for the 150-pound championship immediately after Dan Gable lost to Larry Owings in the historic bout that ended Gable’s 182-match winning streak.
Nearly 35 years later, Ferraro still loves the sport that also made him a successful coach on the high school and college levels, which consisted p
rimarily of a 24-year stint at Bucknell until 1997, when he became the full-time director of the NHSCA. And while Bob has been around the sport a long time, he still is working to expand the sport, including adding national championships for high school sophomore and juniors prior to the start of the annual NHSCA Senior Nationals, which will be held March 21-24, in Pittsburgh, Pa.And very few people understand how things have changed in this sport, particularly in coaching, wrestlers, rules and spectators more than Ferraro. And in each area, Bob wishes coaches and administrators found a way to use old-school traditions with today’s new philosophies.
For example in coaching, Bob believes young coaches today better understand and teach the technical side of wrestling — since they actually wrestled compared to their predecessors of the 1950s who learned the sport from what they read in a book — but lack something their predecessors excelled in because of necessity.
“The early coaches spent a lot of time trying to develop a good personal relationship with their athlete because that was the only thing they had to offer,” Ferraro said. “I am constantly telling coaches that they need to spend more time with the relationships and less emphasis on skills and technique, which wrestlers can get from a videotape.”
Ferraro also believes that wrestlers may have better skills but lack the drive and passion from within.
“If you look at wrestling as an art, wrestling has never been closer to the art in the ways of skills and techniques as it is today,” he said. “But if you look at it as a sport, wrestlers in the past had a burning desire to win with nothing but heart, which made it exciting to watch.”
Ferraro also is critical of today’s rules, which has taken away much of the excitement of a sport that initially drew “warriors with very little skills going after each other and the rules allowed them to do it.”
Ferraro said the “potentially dangerous” call, which began in the 1960s, may have actually cut back the aggressive style that was popular with fans, who he believes are not allowed to get as “involved” as they may have in the past.
“If you look at the other sports, they actually encourage the coach to get emotional and want to capture the emotions,” he said. “In our sport, if a coach shows any emotion at all, they penalize them. The rules have taken the emotion and excitement out of the sport.”
While at Bucknell, Ferraro implemented a “Main Event” philosophy to his home meets, where like boxing he and the opposing coach would determine the top two matches and save them as the final bouts before a halftime break and the end of the dual. The remaining matches would serve as under-cards to those “main” matches.
“The people knew that when they were coming into the gym that there was going to be two matches that they could really look forward to,” he recalled.
Ferraro now tries to teach showmanship to today’s coaches, who must work within different rules created by the 48 different state organizations.
“We are trying to influence the coaches as much as we can about doing things that are creative and still operate within the rules of their state,” said Ferraro, who looks at the NHSCA national championships as more of a celebration of the year. “They certainly could come up with things that are exciting to the fans.”
(Mike Finn, who has covered amateur wrestling for the past 20 years, can be reached at mikef@WIN-magazine.com.)
(You can also read this article by subscribing to W.I.N. Magazine. Either contact our office at 1-888-305-0606 or subscribe through this website by selecting the “Subscribe” section on our front page.)