The Case for the Olympic Styles

Like most Americans, Terry Steiner grew up dreaming of becoming an NCAA and Olympic wrestling champion. He fulfilled that first dream in 1993, wrestling for Dan Gable and the Iowa Hawkeyes. And while he went on to a pretty successful international career as a member of the U.S. national freestyle team from 1992 to 2000, Steiner said it wasn't until about 1998 that he felt completely comfortable competing against the rest of the world’s best wrestlers.

Translation: The best years of his international career were spent learning a wrestling style that his opponents from other countries had already mastered.

There so many different skills that need to be learned to compete and win at the Olympic and World Championship level, says Steiner, who has been the U.S. Women's wrestling national coach since 2002. In freestyle, for example, there is no advantage for riding time, but in America, youth and high school wrestlers and coaches spend countless hours training on how to master wrestling on top and how to defend against riding. There are numerous tactical, stylistic, and general mat awareness differences between the two styles as well. “It can take years to fully develop into a successful freestyle wrestler if you don’t focus on that style full-time,” he explains.

Bill Scherr links the success of American wrestling at the World and Olympic level to its health and relevance as a youth and high school varsity sport. Scherr was a bronze medalist at 100 kg/220 lbs. at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul and his five consecutive years winning World and Olympic medals for the United States is one of the longest medal streaks in American wrestling history. Based on that experience, he now advocates transitioning American youth and high school wrestlers away from folkstyle. By making those changes earlier, Scherr says the sport would be set up for greater success in the long run.

"People say wrestling is wrestling," Scherr notes. "But it's not the same. There are major differences between freestyle and folkstyle.” And when more U.S. wrestlers succeed in the Olympics, more youth athletes will see that success and want to emulate it. Parents see it. Coaches see it. The media sees it. So why spend years training those future international stars in a completely different style? “To be competitive on a long-term basis, we must keep America competitive on a world level and to keep the sport as part of the Olympics, we need to succeed at the international level.”

That contrasts with today's high school wrestling programs, which compete in folkstyle during the scholastic season. Freestyle and Greco-Roman are part of many wrestlers’ training, but mostly only during the spring and summer wrestling season. If youth wrestlers start focusing on freestyle versus folkstyleat age five, they are going to have that much more experience as they develop. That adds up to literally thousands of hours and hundreds of matches worth of extra training in the Olympic styles of wrestling.

"It's got to change from top to bottom," Steiner says. Start at the collegiate level. Gradually incorporate more freestyle rules and scoring. Then, he says, make those same changes over time at the high school, middle school, and youth levels.  

Steiner and Scherr say top college coaches like John Smith at Oklahoma State, Tom Brands at Iowa, Cael Sanderson at Penn State, and J Robinson at Minnesota are on board with this shift. And they can help high school and youth coaches and supporters see the benefits of the change. "If we would make the change, the U.S. would dominate the world, no doubt," Steiner says.

Women's college wrestling already adheres to freestyle rules, Steiner notes. But he points out that many girls who begin collegiate wrestling are not prepared or as skilled as they could be because they only competed in folkstyle at the high school level. He would like to see girls’ high school wrestling change to freestyle only. And he believes it would also benefit boys wrestling to make the switch too.

Although Scherr says a growing number of people recognize this change to freestyle should be made, he acknowledges it’s still a controversial topic, especially at the college level. "It's not going to happen overnight,” Scherr says, “but if we make small changes, in the long run, it's going to make a big impact.”

Switching to freestyle from folkstyle could further leverage a big advantage the United States has over its international competitors. In almost every other country, wrestling is only a club sport. Here in the U.S., however, there is a much more robust feeder program thanks to breadth of high school varsity programs. According to data provided by the National Federation of High School Associations, scholastic wrestling ranked 6th in all-boys’ sports participation rates last year, with 258,208 athletes nationwide. And between 1994 and 2015, the number of women who wrestled each year on a high school team has grown from 804 to 11,496.

Kyle Snyder offers a glimpse of what the future of youth and high school wrestling might look like. Snyder went 179-0 in his first three years of high school, but skipped his senior year to instead participate in USA Wrestling’s resident freestyle training program in Colorado Springs. In 2015, at the age of 19, he won a gold medal at 97 kg/213 lbs. at the World Wrestling Championships, becoming the youngest American ever to win a World title. Snyder has also won an NCAA individual and team title at Ohio State University and will represent the United States at 97 kg/213 lbs. in the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

"If you want to be the best at something, you can benefit by focusing on that style specifically," Snyder explains. "If you want to be the best freestyler, training freestyle only will make you better. If you want to be the best Greco-Roman wrestler, training Greco would make you better.”

In the end, both Scherr and Steiner say the argument for moving youth wrestling from folkstyle to freestyle comes down to both common sense and long-term vision. Or as, Snyder neatly sums the challenge of practicing folkstyle for years only to switch to freestyle right before international competition: "It's like an Olympic-caliber athlete training on high hurdles and then trying to compete and win in the steeplechase.”