New rules present a weighty issue

Thursday, Dec. 21, 2006

It ‘s the season for feasts, parties, and the incredulous disbelief of what the bathroom scale is telling you. A little eggnog here, a little turkey there, and half a pie to chase it down, and the holidays quickly glut the waistline.

That is, unless you’re a high school wrestler.

Instead of any turkey or ham, pie or mashed potatoes, wrestlers have always been in a world of calorie counting and weight watching. Making weight is an obsession with these athletes.

At times, the obsession went too far. Cutting became the norm—that if you were strong for your normal weight of 140 pounds, dropping down to 135 pounds could make you much stronger. To get into that weight bracket, wrestlers would go to extremes—starvation, long runs of jogging in plastic suits, even spitting and induced vomiting, all in the name of being competitive.

Wrestling is coming up against a gruesome 10-year anniversary, when three athletes died in separate incidents, all cutting to try and make weight.

Since then, college and high school organizations have given the sport several overhauls. The NCAA cracked down on cutting and put in new monitoring guidelines, among them a five percent body fat minimum. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) would follow suit, suggesting a 7 percent limit for boys and a 12 percent limit for girls.

Training in plastic suits and use of laxatives are now banned for wrestlers. Weigh-ins now must be done within a couple hours of a tournament. And by 2003, the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association (MPSSAA) posted a healthy eating guide for wrestlers.

But it’s this year that a new level of changes has hit high school wrestling. The NFHS has set a new screening of guidelines in an attempt to end rapid weight loss, paralleling again the methods used by the NCAA.

First, wrestlers were tested for body hydration and a body fat assessment. And after a full practice, they were then weighed in. That weight became their baseline, and they were only allowed to lose 1.5 percent of their body weight a week. So if a 145-pound wrestler came in five pounds overweight, they would be sidelined for three weeks.

Dave Carlsrud, the chairperson of the NFHS Wrestling Rules Committee, described the rule chance as monumental in a press release.

‘‘While weight management has been researched for many years and may have been passed earlier, a number of our states needed time to prepare for an effective implementation,” Carlsrud said.

The system right now has loopholes in it large enough to snare wild animals inside of. The standards created by the NFHS are both overly accurate and vague at the same time, setting numerical benchmarks for hydration and body masses, but glazing over important details like when the testing should be done.

And in the spirit of NFHS’s edict to let the states decide things on their own, the MPSSAA has in turn left it up to the counties to set up their own testing screening.

South Carroll High wrestling coach Dennis Frazier took his team through testing on the third day of practice, as was deemed by Carroll County. In Frederick County, testing didn’t happen until the end of November.

‘‘When college [teams do] it, they certify the month before the season starts, which is fine,” Frazier said. ‘‘We certify after practice has already started.”

Tuscarora head coach Tim Ford was used as a touchstone on the topic by other coaches, as he has experience with Midwest wrestling. According to Ford, if a wrestler tested in as dehydrated in Baltimore or Montgomery County, they just tacked on five pounds to your weigh-in.

Colleges, meanwhile, run the fat and hydration tests a full day before the weight-check, and both tests are done a month before the season even starts.

‘‘I have an issue with it because we’re administering a test that’s designed for adults,” Ford said.

Physically, there are massive differences between a 21-year-old and a 17-year-old, and another leap in changes down to a 14-year-old.

‘‘They should either have the hydration test, or the 1.5. Not both,” Frazier said. ‘‘This is high school, you don’t need both.”

And there are other dangers to the current method. With some teams facing holes in their lineups from the weight rules, competition can take over. It hasn’t been uncommon in the first couple weeks of the season to see wrestlers move up two or three weight classes just to make sure they contribute to the team. It’s because of a game of picking the lesser of two evils—either losing weight fast, or giving up 20-35 pounds in a wrestling match.

Neither is particularly healthy.

In an unrelated note, there’s been a lot of talk in the wrestling community lately, and while the weight change has been the current hot button, the level of local wrestling. Locals have repeatedly talked about the good crop of wrestlers this year, especially from schools in The Gazette’s coverage area in Frederick, Carroll and Howard Counties. This is in part to a rise in power from Frederick County schools, as well as some talented crops of grapplers at the traditional powerhouses.