By Mike Finn, W.I.N. Editor
Jim Giunta has been on this road before when it comes to creating wrestling opportunities; you know the long one where the chance to compete is thwarted by policies and politics of the day.

For similar to today’s dilemma of creating new college wrestling opportunities in a climate of Title IX excuses, Giunta faced a similar wall of apathy nearly two decades ago when the state of Texas did not sponsor high school wrestling.
“I ran high school wrestling in Texas and we worked for about 20 years to finally get it from club status in Texas to being run by the state (association),” said Giunta, a native of Texas, who has seen the Lone Star state become one of the largest in the nation for wrestling participation. “We forced them to take (wrestling) by producing so many numbers and becoming so apparent that they almost had to take it.”
Fast forward to today’s problem of creating college opportunities, and Giunta believes in a similar solution to what he faced with Texas high school wrestling, but with a cockeyed capitalistic equation: create a supply of wrestlers and the demand for opportunities will follow.
And the native of Dallas is trying to do that with the National Collegiate Wrestling Association, which excels in creating college wrestling opportunities — albeit on the club level — for high school wrestlers.
“I think the same thing that happened in Texas, can happen nationally if we flood the colleges with wrestling programs,” said Giunta, whose business is investments and financial planning, but his love is for wrestling, which is why he serves as the executive director of the NCWA.
Since Giunta created the the association in 1997, he has created opportunities in at 140 different colleges around the nation.
“I think we can do that very inexpensively and very quickly the way we are doing it,” said Giunta. “We ran the same model we used to get the state of Texas to take wrestling.”
And from that dream, Giunta hopes to create more varsity programs even if that means losing one of the NCWA’s club teams.
“That’s the mission,” Giunta said. “If we could get every wrestling program in the NCAA, that would be perfect. That’s why I started the NCWA.”
The disparity between the 250,000 high school wrestlers, which ranks sixth among all prep sports, and the 15,000 college opportunities is what Giunta is trying to close. So Giunta said he actually looks for former high school wrestlers who want to continue wrestling while seeking a college degree.
“I try to catch them as seniors in high school; that’s my biggest challenge, finding those who wrestled in high school and are going to college or have gone to a college and find out there is no wrestling,” Giunta said.
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