Men's & Women's World Cup Headed To Iowa
Men's & Women's World Cup Headed To Iowa
The 2022 Men's and Women's World Cup is returning to the US and will be held in Iowa.
USA Wrestling and United World Wrestling announced today that the 2022 and 2023 World Cups will be held at Xtream Arena in Coralville, Iowa. Full release from USA Wrestling below.
USA Wrestling is pleased to announce that United World Wrestling has awarded both the 2022 and 2023 Menโs and Womenโs Freestyle World Cup events to Xtream Arena in Coralville, Iowa. The 2022 competition will be held December 10-11, and the 2023 competition is set for December 9-10.
The World Cup is the annual international dual meet championships. This will be the first time in history that the menโs freestyle World Cup and the womenโs freestyle World Cup events will be held side-by-side.
This will also be the second time that the menโs freestyle World Cup has been held in the Iowa City area, as the 2018 World Cup was hosted at the world-famous Carver-Hawkeye Arena on the campus of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
This will be the first time that the United States has ever hosted the Womenโs World Cup.
โUSA Wrestling is excited to once again bring one of the most important wrestling competitions on the planet to the Coralville/Iowa City community, which is truly an international wrestling hotbed. We are extremely pleased that we will be able to showcase the worldโs best menโs and womenโs freestyle wrestlers in the same location. The atmosphere will be electric and fans will not want to miss this action,โ said USA Wrestling Executive Director Rich Bender.
The Menโs Freestyle World Cup features the top five menโs freestyle wrestling teams in the world plus an all-world team, while the Womenโs Freestyle World Cup features the top five womenโs freestyle wrestling teams in the world, plus an all-world team.
The all-world teams will be comprised of athletes whose teams finished outside the top five in the team race at the World Championships.
Those teams will be determined based upon the team results of the Senior World Championships events earlier each year. The 2022 Senior World Championships are set for Belgrade, Serbia, and the 2023 Senior World Championships will be hosted in Krasnoyarsk, Russia.
โFor the first time in history, the Womenโs World Cup will be held in the United States. This will also be the first time that the World Cup for both menโs and womenโs freestyle will be held together. I canโt think of a better place to host these events than in the state of Iowa, and in the Iowa City/Coralville community. I know that this community appreciates great wrestling. They are in for a spectacular event, with the best teams in the world battling for World dual meet titles,โ said Terry Steiner, USA Wrestling National Womenโs Coach.
This will be the 31st time the United States has hosted the menโs freestyle World Cup event, the most of any nation. Coralville will become the 10th U.S. city to host the Freestyle World Cup. The other U.S. cities which have hosted the World Cup include Toledo, Ohio (17 times); Los Angeles, Calif. (three times) Chattanooga, Tenn. (twice); Spokane, Wash.(twice); Stillwater, Okla. (twice); Baltimore, Md.; Fairfax, Va., Boise, Idaho and Iowa City, Iowa.
Coralvilleโs new Xtream Arena opened in September 2020, and USA Wrestling has held a number of major events there, including the 2020 Senior Nationals, the 2021 UWW Junior and Senior Nationals, as well as the 2021 High School National Recruiting Showcase and the USA Wrestling Girls Folkstyle Nationals.
The local organizing committee is Think Iowa City and the Iowa City Area Sports Commission, which helped host the highly-successful 2012 and 2016 U.S. Olympic Team Trials and the 2018 Menโs Freestyle World Cup at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Ticket packages for the general public for the 2022 Menโs and Womenโs Freestyle World Cup go on sale on Friday, February 4 at 10:00 a.m. CT. The seating capacity for Xtream Arena for the World Cup will be approximately 5,300. Fans are encouraged to buy immediately, as organizers expect to sell out quickly.
The effort to combine the menโs and womenโs World Cup and bring them to Iowa City has been many years in the making. The Iowa City Area Sports Commission and its leaders came up with concept shortly after the 2018 World Cup and worked with USA Wrestling to make this vision a reality.
Local leaders Josh Schamberger and Luke Eustice went to United World Wrestling headquarters to meet with its staff and pitch the idea, which was very well received. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, the project was put on hold during the shutdown.
This year, a revised proposal was presented to United World Wrestling, which agreed to award the events to Coralville, Iowa.
โThe Iowa City Area Sports Commission has made significant investments into girls and womenโs wrestling this past decade. In so many ways, this combined World Cup is an extension of this effort. This inaugural Menโs and Womenโs Freestyle World Cup will reverberate across the wrestling globe. We couldnโt be more honored to be the community chosen to set the bar for how this event should look and run for decades to come. And quite honestly, we aim for that bar to actually never be reached outside of Iowa City, IowaโฆWrestling Town, USA,โ said Josh Schamberger, President of Think Iowa City.
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