February 19, 2008

Somewhere in the brains of Trent Kroll and Keith Bassham are thoughts that don’t pertain to wrestling.

When it comes to the sport of wrestling the HRVHS has a pair of in-house experts in its athletic director and coach.

Kroll is in his second year coaching at HRVHS after previously coaching at Centennial High School, and wrestling collegiately at Pacific University in Forest Grove. He has also served on numerous wrestling advisory committees.

Bassham was recently inducted into the Oregon chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, organized several district wrestling tournaments, and has been involved in coaching wrestling in the Hood River area for nearly three decades.

Both accompanied the Hood River Valley wrestling team to Portland, where hundreds of high school wrestlers descended on the Memorial Coliseum for the Oregon state wrestling tournament to showcase the present and future for a sport that has had an up-and-down ride in recent years.

“This is the world’s oldest sport,” Kroll said from the floor of the Coliseum Thursday. “Throughout history you would put two guys in the ring and they would wrestle.”

Yet things have changed.

While it may still come down to the two competitors in the ring, matches are stopped as soon as a competitor shows any sign of blood, mats are sprayed with anti-viral chemicals to prevent infection, and the way wrestlers lose weight to qualify for matches is closely monitored.

“I think five years ago we were in danger because of weight-cutting practices,” Kroll said.

Wrestlers used to crash to their competing weight in the day or hours before their match. That practice is gone now, and Kroll thinks the sport is far better off because of it.

“We need to educate people that we have fixed that,” he said.

Yet, after combating one problem, wrestling faced another in the form of skin infection. Entire tournaments have been canceled in recent years due to breakouts of skin disease.

Now the traffic on mats is carefully monitored, they are sprayed down with disinfectant several times during tournaments. Many next-generation mats, like those at the state tournament, come pre-coated with a compound that kills off infectious microbes.

Even with the health problems being addressed, wrestling had to struggle to survive past the high school level.

For many college programs needing to cut a program to stay Title IX compliant, wrestling was the first to go. Just last year, the University of Oregon gave its wrestling program the ax to make room for baseball.

That, Bassham says, was a mistake. Many college programs, including Oregon, have been a feeder for talent to the U.S. Olympic and national programs.

“That is (Oregon Athletic Director Pat Killkenny’s) lack of knowledge about the sport,” he said.

But as options narrow on one level, they open up on another.

“The sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) is growing by leaps and bounds,” Kroll said.

MMA itself has evolved from a loosely disciplined blood sport, to a huge moneymaker with elite athletes.

Many wrestlers who don’t harbor post-collegiate Olympic aspirations are turning to MMA as a way to keep practicing the disciplines of wrestling and have the chance to earn some money doing it.

The future of wrestling may ultimately lie in the fact that it is sport that can fit anyone of any race, gender or body type under its umbrella.

Girls’ wrestling has grown exponentially in recent years with increasing opportunities at the collegiate level and expanding youth programs around the nation.

“Girls wrestling has been a continuous growth,” Bassham said.

Bassham has also seen constant growth and an increase in funding in youth programs and junior national teams particularly in Oregon in recent years.

“We’ve grown a lot in Oregon and now we just need to keep it growing,” Bassham said.

That growth was evident as competitors from both genders, and all manner of shapes and sizes took to the matches at the Coliseum, and as long as they keep turning out, Kroll thinks the future of the sport is in good hands.

“I see a kid in the hall and I say ‘Hey, you look like a wrestler!’” He said. “The thing is, everyone can be a wrestler.”