Anchorage Daily News

While watching her 7-year-old son Daniel take part in the Great Alaska Wrestling Camp at Service High last week, Melissa Frentzel ticked off a list of benefits Daniel gets from the sport.

One of them is it's a sport he could one day compete in at college.

My, how the times have changed.

Since 1972, when Congress passed Title IX legislation designed to provide equal educational opportunities for women, college wrestling has been pinned tightly to the mat while hundreds of schools eliminated the sport in order to achieve gender equity.

But college wrestling is on the verge of scoring an escape from this downward spiral, thanks to the emergence of the National Collegiate Wrestling Association.

"It's a way to get wrestling started again at some of these schools," said Dave Mills, head clinician at last week's camp and coach of an NCWA program at Michigan's Grand Valley State University. "And it's a way to have wrestling established at these schools in case they get to move back in (to the NCAA)."

The NCWA got its start in 1997 when 19 collegiate club wrestling teams banded together and created a national championship tournament to cap their season.

Those 19 programs have grown in six years to 101 teams -- still just a fraction of the 439 college wrestling programs axed since 1972, but more than the 91 programs remaining in NCAA Division I.

The group has created a significant increase in opportunities for athletes who want to continue wrestling beyond high school.

"It seems like a good idea to me," said Erik Bollerud, a Service High senior who hopes to continue wrestling after his final high school season. "The (scholarshipped) college teams only take the top wrestlers. There's other guys out there who may not be Olympic material but still want to do it."

It's true that the NCWA wrestlers do not receive athletic scholarships, and they can't compete in the NCAA or NAIA championships.

But they very often compete against their NCAA and NAIA counterparts in regular-season matches, and the NCWA tournament offers chances for national championships and All-America honors.

"We compete in the Penn Invitational, and we compete against all the D-I programs in Virginia," said Mike Clayton, coach at the Apprentice School for shipbuilders in Newport News, Va. "We're competing in big events, and we're finding we're competitive."

Eventually, it is hoped, many of these NCWA programs will find their way back into the sanctioned graces of the NCAA or NAIA, where they existed before falling victim to the Title IX mandates of the mid-'70s.

At that time, schools were charged with providing a balance of men's and women's athletic opportunities that mirrored the general student population. The number of women's athletic programs grew rapidly, which was desired. But many schools found they could only afford to achieve balance by eliminating men's programs, a trend that continues today.

Wrestling has not been the only victim -- men's gymnastics, baseball and swimming also have been hit hard. But as a nonrevenue sport with no women's equivalent, wrestling has been an easy target.

"Wrestling has really taken it on the chin from Title IX," said Mike Mills, Dave's brother and an Anchorage attorney who wrestled at Notre Dame before that school's program was cut in the early 1990s. "Because of the NCWA, the pendulum is swinging, though. What they want is to have those programs there when the political climate changes."

Men's wrestling may find one of its best allies in, ironically, a women's college sport.

Over the past several years, dozens of schools have started women's wrestling programs. Alaskans Melina Hutchison of Soldotna and Tela O'Donnell of Homer have gotten in on the ground floor, and O'Donnell has earned her way onto the U.S. Olympic Developmental program for women's wrestling, which will be a demonstration sport in the 2004 Summer Olympics.

If women's wrestling continues to grow -- and an Olympic bump can't hurt its popularity -- it may be hard for colleges to justify having women's programs while keeping the door closed to the men. While their college programs may have vanished in the last 30 years, the wrestlers are not going away.

"I think what the NCWA has done," Mike Mills said with a nod toward the mat at Service High, "is demonstrate the interest is still there."

Reporter J.R. Rardon can be reached at jrardon@adn.com.