I was talking about HS AD's not college AD's. Wrestling, even at the college level, is not an economic drain. The NCAA and Title IX have made college sports a numbers game as well as a business. You will be hard pressed to find many women's programs that generate net revenue. Thus the problem...
A HS wrestling program can easily pay for itself and make money. Football rarely makes money and in fact, if cut, could in most cases pay for all other extra curricular activities.
Will,
I did understand that you were talking about high school athletic directors. However, I used college athletic directors because I see the decisions that they have made to drop wrestling programs over the last few decades as an example of how wrestling does not always fare well when educational institutions purely run their departments based on profit making business decisions. We can blame Title IX and it has deinitely had an effect. However, there are reasons that wrestling and not football is the sport that is dropped by college athletic departments. Those reasons in my opinion are profit motivated business decisions made by college athletic directors. They evidently determine that football is or at least has the potential to be a bigger revenue and net profit generator than wrestling. And I am talking about total revenue brought into the institution, including large donations made by alumni and other donors. It would also include sponsporship money from corporate donors, more television exposure and bowl game revenue. If business profit making decisions are not the reason that college ADs pick football over wrestling, convince me that it is something else. They certainly could make their Title IX numbers better by dropping football over wrestling, since football has a lot more athletes than wrestling. I have come to the believe that we will not see college Division i wrestling programs grow or stop the decline until we get more money into college wrestling. Endowment funding or other types of gifting to colleges that have programs would be one way to achieve that. I encourage everyone in the Kansas wrestling community to contribute on a regular basis to a local Kansas college wrestling program and try to increase your contributions to the programs on an annual basis. Contact the college wrestling coaches on how to do that.
Will, as far as on how high school wrestling does as a profit making activity or in simply just paying for itself, I am not that familiar with the financial situation in high school wrestling. You say it is not an economic drain for the high schools and maybe that is true. A question I have for you on that is assuming it is true, could part of the reason be that high school wrestling might not really be paying the true cost for some of their expenses. Are some of these costs subsidized? For instance it has been my impression that high school coaches probably do not get paid for coaching anywhere near what they should considering the time and effort they put in. I would be interested in knowing how many total hours a typical high school wrestling coaching staff puts in, what their total coaching salary is and how much that translates to for an hourly wage. I have a feeling it is not too high but I could be wrong. I know that there are many activities that occur in a high school wrestling tournament that are done by volunteers that would also be an economic drain if paid for as a typical business would. Another thing I am not sure of is do wrestling teams have to pay some sort of rent on their practice facilities and for utilities and do they pay a rent for tournament usage? I think it is okay and very good that some of these high school sports costs are possibly being subsidized and supported also by volunteer efforts including those of coaches if they are being paid a low hourly wage. However, they need to be factored in if you are determining if the sports are really making money in the traditional business profit making sense that you are talking about.
