By Wade Schalles and Chuck Harman
Board Members, International Fraternity of Wrestlers

“Olympic sports have become an endangered species at many major universities where athletic departments are trying to remedy deficits and invest more heavily in those sports that generate revenue like football and men’s basketball.” – Liz Clarke June 2, 2012 Washington Post

As the facts are revealed about college sports only football and men’s basketball generate revenue, and only a few of them do. Granted, there are some non-revenue sports that are close to being self-sufficient but the percentages who are in that category is so low that it’s negligible.

So basically, other than football and basketball at maybe 40 to 50 schools, every other college or University has a negative balance sheet. Then when you add to the mix that quite a few colleges and universities are expanding their financial commitment to academic research, the fight over budgetary needs becomes intense.

In translation, what use to be a symbiotic relationship between institutional departments has developed into a much larger battle over funding.

As a result it becomes hard for anyone to defend the need for non-revenue sports when research scientists plead their case for cancer funding or new ways to improve the annual yield of wheat; especially when wrestling spends over a million dollars a year at some institutions.

As a comparison, an average team among the nation’s major football programs deposits somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million dollars a year into their school’s account. They do that as a result of 4 major forms of income.

  1. Ticket Sales
  2. Television contracts
  3. Merchandise licensing
  4. Corporate Partnerships

Of those four, how does wrestling fair?

  1. Ticket Sales – MARGINAL TO NON-EXISTENT.
  2. Television contracts – No, none or few
  3. Merchandise licensing – No, none or few
  4. Corporate Partnerships – Too few to mention

Let’s face facts, Sports in the United States is a business and every institution has accountants and many others whose job it is to look at the bottom line.

Most, if not all of the flagship college wrestling programs lose money. In 2012 it has been reported one of the winningest and an annual top 10 programs lost $624,000; that’s more money than 90% of all wrestling programs have in their entire budgets.

As a result, wrestling is definitely a non-revenue sport, actually the words non-revenue are kind, Wrestling is actually a negative revenue sport. That’s just simply the fact, don’t hate the messenger. As the NCAA focuses on revenue producing sports, we’re not only seeing the results of wrestling being a negative revenue sport but we’re feeling them too. We’re at a point in history where we have to turn things around in a hurry or perish on the college and university levels.

The International Fraternity of Wrestling (IFW) has been formed to be the platform to turn the tide.

Did you know that there are over 11 million people in the United States who have wrestling in their background. Wrestling and all wrestlers – current and those who have hung up their shoes need to come together under one politically and economically compelling platform! That platform is the solution and it is the International Fraternity of Wrestlers.

There is no question this is an uphill battle but it’s worth doing and it starts with you.

Please consider joining the International Fraternity of Wrestlers. The sport can only win when those who benefited from participating give back.

Join Today!