Discussion on Businesses and Wrestling : Speakers & Interviews

Wrestling needs to change in order to make money. That is why it doesn't make money. How can you change this thing without killing it? What does Gable think? How about Smith or Sanderson? You need to ask those guys and many many others to find out how to do it. Hell... just ask Dana White how to do it! Where are the wrestling reality shows? Why dont we change the USA wrestling tournaments to include a "Finals" show? Just do it like they do in NCAA finals at every single tournament. Get local radio involved to bring folks in for the finals. Pump it up every single weekend. Encourage college age and older to compete... start offering those winners real cash prizes. Idaho is doing it! Tournaments will always be slow and boring.. even to us wrestlers... but the "finals" are always worth watching. People just want to see who is gonna win. It really doesn't seem that hard to me. I bet it is a hell of a lot easier than winning an Olympic metal.. or an NCAA title.... or a USA national title... or a HS state championship... or even a 15 deep preseason Saturday tournament in Atlanta. We just need get the match ups that people will want to see and the advertise it. Offering cash to winners will make competition grow more fiercely. We need to grow with MMA. Without wrestling there is no MMA and everyone knows it.... BTW I am unemployed and want to work in wrestling... Not really interested in teaching school classes though... Just wrestling.

This is all a bunch of garbage and you are all ruining the good name of wrestling. Wrestling is from ancient Greece, it's in the Olympics. Why do I care? These kids made it so real wrestling is gone from schools, its practically gone from the culture. Dammit they took my job! You want to know pain, pain is dedicating your entire life to a sport, to a career, and then having it ripped away from you like a babe from its mother. Lost everything, couldn't even afford to pay for my little retriever Rex anymore. Animal control came and got him. I ended up on the streets stealing, got busted by the police and had to spend a night in jail. The other inmates there beat me up, fractured my jaw to where I couldn't eat. So you see I have nothing left, NOTHING, not even the will to live.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/251887

Absolutely agree. Count me in as one person who pursued another profession because a living couldnt be made off of wrestling, and who also tremendously values the critical volunteered time that keeps our sport alive.

We get taught all of our wrestling career the principle that if we work hard, it will be rewarded, both intrinsically and extrinsically. The harder you work, the more you win, the better you improve and achieve. Yet, after this training for years, we then get plopped into the unionized world of public education employment of junior highs, high schools, and even colleges that begin by lowballing their prices for top notch coaches to almost insulting levels of entry level teachers, despite the remarkable and elite credentials that many coaches bring to the table. No wonder people leave and pursue other industries where success is actually rewarded, incentives drive training and performance, and where poor training/performance is equally matched with a poor reward. You can never fix wrestling in the compensation manner, never address these issues of allowing people the ability to honorably profit off of the sport while keeping the sport equally honest, without addressing the much broader issues of unionized labor in the education system that employs the lion share of our coaches, and refuses to allow them to be fired for bad performance, even though their athletes can still be benched or pinned for bad performance. Ironic, huh?
How attractive is it to a state champ, All american college wrestler who has spend his entire life working hard to outcompete the competition to achieve success, to then face down a job where he will be underpaid, underappreciated by professional colleagues (principles, ADs, teachers, adminstrations), and be paid as a public teacher with no incentive to perform, no incentive to win team and indiv titles, and no accountability after a meager 3 year tenure process if they remain mediocre and dont win? Only the rare, top programs seem to deviate from this model, because otherwise it requires the complete self sacrifice of a labor of love for a career.
Put a college All-american in this model, and it instantly becomes frustrating when he knows he has elite skills, abilities, and training to be far more successful in many other industries or fields in order to provide better for a family equivalent to the quantity and caliber of the work effort that he invests on the front end.
Its systemic, and broader than just wrestling. If you raise the issue of incentives, making money for the labor of wrestling and coaching, this conversation can not be had in a viable manner without also including a major addressing of the unionized labor issues of public education. In my view, at least, unless you want to privatize the whole sport, and I dont think gymnastics is anything close to a model of success for that based upon history.

Not sure how reasonable it would be to pay table workers for youth or high school tournaments, but college tournaments and duals should certainly have more paid workers. A lot of teams have their wrestlers do this or tournaments have high school wrestlers working and often not paying attention. Anyway I agreed with his mentality and attitude, getting outsiders interested like Martin and Joe discuss would bring a new perspective to wrestling and change it for the better. There is too much stale thinking within wrestling, but flowrestling has done a lot to change this thankfully.

The stronger the industry surrounding wrestling the stronger our sport will be. Our country, like it or not, is market driven. If people's livelihood depends on the survival of our sport that is good for the sport.