Brownwrestler1975

Technically during the pandemic I cancelled my Flo subscription a day late. After I complained to my credit card company, Flo wanted to negotiate, but I ignored their appeals. Ultimately I didn’t have to pay them anything for the non renewal.

Riverside CA is hardly a country town with a population of 2.4 million.

The only way to ensure wrestling is not dropped as a collegiate varsity sport is through active alumni involvement and funding. Brown tried to drop wrestling twice, once in 1974 when I was there, and again in 2011. I was in the class of 1975, and besides being a wrestler, I became an activist along with the rest of the team. The University had announced that the program was to be eliminated in 1974, and the situation looked bleak. There was no alumni outreach at the time, so we created one. And our heavyweight, Mike Wallace (a National Prep Champion), who was also on the football team, convinced Joe Wirth, an assistant football coach, to also be the head wrestling coach, despite Joe knowing next to nothing about wrestling, which ultimately was enough to appease the University to keep the program alive. And the program survived to see better days, unlike the programs at Yale and Dartmouth, even with Yale having a national champion, Jim Bennett, during my time at Brown. It is truly a shame these programs did not survive. Then, later Dave Amato became Brown’s head wrestling coach in 1983, who through a 30-year career went on to become the most successful head coach yet in Brown University wrestling history, with over 300 dual meet victories. During this period, ten of his wrestlers captured EIWA Championships, while two were named the Outstanding Wrestler at the Tournament. Amato's wrestlers placed 116 times at EIWA Championships. A total of 27 of Amato's Bears have earned First Team All-Ivy honors 44 times, including four-time All-Ivy Joe Mocco '93. In 1992, Amato was named EIWA Coach of the Year after he led the Bears to a record 19 victories and saw four Brown wrestlers qualify for the NCAA Championships. In 1993, Brown sent a record-setting six wrestlers to the NCAA's, the most ever in Amato's career. In addition, Amato's 379 career wins ranked in the top three (at the time) among all NCAA Division I active coaches. Finally, two of Amato's wrestlers earned All-American recognition, Willie Carpenter in 1996 and Tivon Abel in 1998. Near the end of Amato’s’ tenure after a poor season in 2010, the University again decided to eliminate the program in 2011. Though uncertainty over the future of the team was a source of stress for players and coaches alike during the last few months of the 2011 season, Amato said the seniors "rallied like crazy" to preserve a sense of unity. "Those were the guys who kept everyone else around," he said, and the players were approaching this season with "renewed vigor to save the program.” This time with very active alumni support, the team was able to rally against the threat of elimination through the Save Brown Wrestling campaign. "When your sport is on the chopping block, you could see that it re-energized us," "It was a calling." Well, no more elimination threats, with the wrestling program winning Brown’s one-day fundraising contest last year among its other 28 varsity programs, raising over $400,000 in a single day, with close to 400 wrestling alumni contributing, providing second-year coach Jordan Leen the funding he needed to assemble an outstanding coaching staff and a renewed recruiting vigor.

My background as a management consultant is that there are two topics to avoid if trying to attract new customers (or in sports new audiences) - religion and politics. Just saying…

If only NCAA wrestling were anywhere close to the strength of the NFL, this conversation about how to improve the viewership experience with wrestling would not be necessary.

Comparing NCAA wrestling to the NFL is a bit of a stretch

The fact that wrestling enjoys its greatest popularity in the most conservative and religious corners of the US (and the world) is not helping at all in the other half of this country; I mean what other championship event has such blatant displays of Christianity even badmouthing other religions?

The trolls of social media are no help with the homoerotic crap, who are mostly couch potatoes, and no zilch about both the physical and mental intensity of wrestling.

Bonus point matches were also the difference in the EIWA win over Lehigh.

Cornell does just enough to win the EIWA with a thin victory over Lehigh, and then as usual saves all of its panache for the big dance.

It’s time to get beyond the ramifications of the pandemic, the cancelled tournament in 2020, and five time All Americans.

Next year should be interesting with the Ivy’s having their own conference. The 2023 EIWA tournament was their last competition in the EIWA. THE EIWA will be much smaller with 11 teams instead of 17 this year.

And Cornell, with far more restrictive eligibility requirements as part of Ivy League finishes 2nd in a year with many 5-time all Americans, with the extra year of eligibility given to everyone outside the Ivy League which doesn’t even allow redshirting and forbids graduate students from eligibility.

Can we take the religious stuff out of watching a sport?

He has only been stealing everyone else’s money for his entire life