By Rob Sherrill, W.I.N. High School Editor

Another NHSCA National High School Wrestling Championships is in the books.

Not only has the tournament become one of the can’t-miss events on the national scholastic wrestling calendar, but the opinion of wrestlers, high school coaches and college coaches alike is unanimous: Over the course of its now 18-year history, the National High School Wrestling Championships has changed wrestling’s landscape.

In its infancy, the tournament created something that had been missing: an opportunity for the nation’s top high school seniors, particularly those not already signed to college scholarships, to establish important connections with college coaches looking to recruit the top available talent.

Over the years, many wrestlers have attracted the interest of college coaches and earned their scholarships by putting together solid National High School Championships performances. Undoubtedly, that will be the case again in the coming weeks.

As the tournament matures, the NHSCA has expanded the event to include all four high school grade levels: freshmen through seniors. This year’s first full-circle tournament attracted a record 2,268 wrestlers.

The most compelling — and most untold — story was the second straight major increase in the size of the National High School Juniors Wrestling Championships. Now in its third year, the Juniors tournament attracted 705 competitors, nearly as many as the 761 who competed in the NHSCA’s long-standing crown jewel, the National Seniors Championships.

Don’t be surprised if that changes soon. My prediction: The National Juniors field will blast through the 1,000 mark within three years.

Given the tournament’s strong loyalty among both high school coaches and college coaches — representatives of more than 200 colleges and universities were in attendance at Virginia Beach — it’s not hard to see why.

Let’s compare the event to USA Wrestling’s signature age-group event, the Cadet and Junior Nationals in Fargo, N.D.

For years, the Cadet and Junior Nationals has established the gold standard for bringing the greatest representation among the nation’s elite wrestlers from coast to coast. The housing of both tournaments under the same roof at the FargoDome also brought huge numbers of wrestlers from all four high school grade levels together, plus a significant number of eighth-graders as well.

The Junior Nationals and the freestyle tournament, in particular, has developed a reputation for becoming the proving ground for the nation’s top juniors. College coaches attend in large numbers and since college coaches can begin formally recruiting rising seniors on July 1, the event’s timing is perfect for such contacts.

Many seniors do compete, but many who already have college scholarships in hand elect to skip the event for a variety of reasons. Some have nothing more to prove. Some want to take a break to prepare for their impending adjustment to college. Still others have gotten the go-ahead — or have been persuaded — by their future college coaches to take a pass. Yes, that does happen.

The Junior Nationals has also been hurt by FILA, the world governing body, with its dramatic new rules for Greco-Roman and freestyle that debuted in 2006 and will be in use at least through the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. So different are those rules from the traditional scholastic and collegiate rules that their continuing use could make it more difficult for college coaches to see certain techniques or how wrestlers perform in certain situations.

At Virginia Beach, one college coach after another talked about the growing importance of the NHSCA National Juniors as the field continues to grow.

College coaches want to know, among many other things, if the kid they’re recruiting has a great single-leg and whether he can get off the bottom. And those are the kinds of things those coaches learned at Virginia Beach.

They can’t officially recruit prospects just yet. But they learned who they’ll be approaching on July 1.

And since the National Juniors Championships is an open event — in keeping with National Federation standards for events containing athletes with high school eligibility remaining — any wrestler in the age group is allowed to enter. None of the qualifying criteria that has been part of the National Seniors Championships since its inception are used.

Because of that qualifying criteria, the National Seniors event has leveled off in recent years at just under 800 competitors. That’s not a criticism. It’s simply a truly elite field.

Finally, the NHSCA event takes place within a month of the end of the season for most wrestlers. For many and their coaches, the High School Nationals has become a permanent event on their annual calendar.

So…what’s the ceiling for the National Juniors Championships? Nobody knows. The sky may be the limit.
The NHSCA’s strategy of connecting with high school coaches — and, by extension, connecting them and their wrestlers to college coaches — has been instrumental in the organization’s growth over time. It’s also why the NHSCA National Juniors may become the nation’s top recruiting event sooner rather than later.

Unsung, but vital

Every tournament needs an experienced head table crew and the National High School Wrestling Championships had exactly that.

Three individuals stand out as far as making all the crucial decisions were concerned. Up on the stage, tournament director Keith Shields and computer operations guru Gary “Gimp” Brownell did absolutely thankless but irreplaceable jobs. Shields, a member of the coaching staff at Robert B. Glenn High in Kernersville, N.C., showed the kind of firm, steady hand that’s needed in a job like this.

When Shields made a decision, it stood; an approach that was absolutely required to keep things flowing smoothly. Similarly, there’s some question as to whether New Jersey wrestling would be what it is today without Gimp’s tireless work, as the devotion of the army of members of his fan club showed over the course of the weekend.

And down on the floor, Keith Lowrance, one of the Virginia Beach community’s biggest wrestling supporters, did a good job making sure there were enough volunteers to man the tables and the rest of the floor. This event’s biggest on-site issue over the years has been the lack of a reliable volunteer base. Keith made sure that wrestling was going on at all mats, all the time. It’s hard to remember a National Seniors Championships that ran more smoothly, and Keith’s volunteers were a major reason for that success.

There were more. The incomparable Sandy Stevens was ably assisted by Martin Fleming at the microphone and the Juniors, Sophomores and Freshman events couldn’t have proceeded without Jacob Gaydosh being the announcer and bout master on the other side of the arena.

Three more folks with plenty of experience running events in North Carolina, Paula Navy, Lee Lawson and Jamie Rutherford, also handled the computers and administration. Jamie has a great new Web site, the North Carolina Wrestling Scout Report (www.ncwrestlingscoutreport.com), which contains all the information on the state’s top wrestlers that you always wanted to know.

I know I probably missed some people; no slight intended. But those folks, as they have so many times in the past, went above and beyond the call of duty.


(Rob Sherrill is one of the top high school wrestling analysts in the country and a long-time columnist of W.I.N. He also publishes the “American High School Wrestling Yearbook”. To order a copy, e-mail him at centermatpress@hotmail.com.)