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Wrestling benefits from rookies runs in the NCAA
“Almost everything that is great has been done by youth” – Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) British Statesman. Corningsby, Book III, Ch. 1.
It has become commonplace to stand in awe of those individuals who achieve greatness at a young age. Part of our fascination with youth is that so few people possess the combination of an extreme amount of talent coupled with the mental fortitude to accomplish great things at an early age. Something inside of us tells us that these people aren’t quite ready to conquer the world.
Former child prodigies like Bobby Fischer are mind-boggling. At the age of 13, Fischer began winning chess tournaments and became the youngest chess player ever to win the junior chess championship. “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego,” he once boasted.
Track athletes like Bob Mathias and Jim Ryun took on the world as teenagers and dominated their respective events. In 1948, Mathias won a gold medal at the Olympics in the decathlon at the age of 17 while Ryun was pushed into the limelight by becoming the first high school student to break four minutes in the mile. In 1966, he smashed the world mile record by 2.3 seconds at the age of 19.
Most recently, the accomplishments of athletes like LeBron James in basketball and Michelle Wie in women’s golf have made the sports world take notice of what can be accomplished at a young age. While some sports like gymnastics are dominated by teenagers, most athletic endeavors require a certain degree of development and maturity to be successful. This has often been the case with wrestling.
When high school wrestlers make the transition to college, they are usually redshirted in hopes of gaining a year of experience to make them better equipped for the four years of eligibility they are allowed. Incoming freshmen used to be labeled not ready for the rigors of college life. According to an NCAA account by Ronald A. Smith and Jay W. Helman, the 1929 the Carnegie Report on “American College Athletics” found it inappropriate for freshmen to compete in order to “protect first-year athletes against too heavy encroachments upon their time.”
Freshmen were not allowed to compete in any NCAA-sanctioned sport until 1943. The freshman prohibition rule was lifted because of World War II to allow a larger participation base due to several college-aged students fighting in the war. Because of injuries to several freshmen football players in 1945, the NCAA reversed their decision to let freshmen compete and banned their participation again in 1947.
Since the NCAA did not hold wrestling championships from 1943 through 1945, this meant that wrestlers during this time had a two-year window (1946, 1947) to compete as freshmen. In 1947, several freshmen wrestlers took full advantage of the small crease that the NCAA had allowed.
It can be argued that the 1947 NCAA Championships produced the greatest freshman class in college wrestling history. Of the eight weight classes contested at the time, five individual titles were won by true freshman. Accomplishing this feat were Dick Hauser and Lowell Lange of Cornell College, Bill Nelson of Iowa State Teachers College, Joe Scarpello of Iowa and Dick Hutton of Oklahoma A&M.
Adding to this achievement were the victories of Lowell Lange and Dick Hauser in 1946. As high school seniors at Waterloo West, both wrestlers won national AAU titles before they ever stepped foot on a college wrestling mat.
“Because college wrestling was so regional at the time the AAUs were just as important as the NCAAs because they included high school and post-collegiate wrestlers,” said Arno Niemand, who is currently writing a book about the 1947 Cornell College wrestling team. “It was a very important aspect of wrestling at that time.”
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