The NCAA has introduced the addition of girls’s wrestling as a proper NCAA Championship, bringing the entire as much as 91. Amongst different issues, it will rename the Elite 90 Award, given to the student-athlete with the very best GPA competing on the remaining website of every NCAA Championship sport, to the Elite 91 Award.
Girls’s wrestling now turns into the sixth sport to advance from the NCAA Rising Sports activities for Girls program to full NCAA Championship standing. Earlier sports activities to make the leap are rowing (1996), ice hockey (2000), water polo (2000), bowling (2003) and seashore volleyball (2015).
Within the 2023-24 educational 12 months, these sports activities collectively included practically 14,000 student-athletes, about 6% of the entire student-athletes competing in NCAA girls’s championship sports activities, in accordance with the newest NCAA Sports activities Sponsorship and Participation Charges knowledge. Girls’s wrestling accounted for an extra 1,226 student-athletes in 2023-24.
At the moment 5 sports activities are working to achieve championship standing: acrobatics and tumbling, equestrian, rugby, stunt and triathlon. Moreover, the NCAA acquired an software this summer time requesting that girls’s flag soccer be a part of the rising sports activities program.
There have been 76 girls’s wrestling packages at NCAA faculties in 2023-2024, with 17 extra anticipated to be added this season.Greater than 1,200 girls wrestlers are competing at NCAA faculties at present. The game can also be various. At the least 45% of the student-athletes competing are of ‘various or worldwide backgrounds,’ the NCAA says.
The NAIA is sponsoring its third wrestling championship this 12 months.
Earlier than the Committee on Girls’s Athletics made its advice to maneuver girls’s wrestling to championship standing, 40 faculties needed to sponsor the game at varsity degree and meet different competitors and participant necessities. Girls’s wrestling, which turned an rising sport in 2020, eclipsed the sponsorship minimal within the 2022-23 educational 12 months. A girls’s wrestling committee will now be established to work with NCAA employees on the event of the primary championship for winter 2026.
The addition is a boon for the game, which has misplaced its “core sport” standing forward of the 2016 Olympic Video games. One of many criticisms leveled on the time was the shortage of girls’s competitions for the equality-minded IOC.
Girls’s freestyle wrestling was added to the Olympics in 2004.
A price range from wrestling bluebloods on the College of Iowa reveals an anticipated price of $1.37 million for the ladies’s wrestling program, although they’re anticipated to obtain $80,000 in income from ticket gross sales subsequent season as a part of hovering curiosity in girls’s sports activities. Whereas swimming just isn’t singled out individually as that price range, its income is lumped into an “all different” class which tasks a mixed $51,500 in income.
Different Current NCAA Updates:
- The NCAA has up to date its educational requirements for faculties that need to transition into D1, together with placing extra onus on the conferences inviting these faculties. These faculties that need to transfer should be “above the tenth percentile of Division I members in Tutorial Progress Charge, Commencement Success Charge, or the distinction between the federal commencement charges for student-athletes and for the overall scholar physique” and “meet new monetary support necessities, equivalent to a scholarship providing that exceeds the tenth percentile of energetic Division I members.” The change reduces the reclassification interval to a few years for Division II faculties and 4 years for Division III faculties. Members at the moment within the reclassification course of can use the brand new timeline in the event that they meet all different standards. Development by means of the method depends upon assembly every year’s benchmarks.
- Adopted laws that limits the variety of males’s basketball coaches who might be recruiting off campus on any given day to 4. The change ensures that two coaches stay on campus and obtainable to student-athletes.
- NCAA Division II had a surplus of $2.8 million from the final fiscal 12 months and can use it to fund a supplemental distribution of $2.2 million again to member faculties – about $8,000 per eligible establishment.
- NCAA D2 authorized a proposal to eradicate the requirement {that a} student-athlete should full 18 semester hours or 27 quarter hours of educational credit score throughout the common educational 12 months to be eligible for competitors. From the NCAA: “Supporters of the proposal, efficient Aug. 1, for certification of progress-toward-degree necessities for fall 2025 and thereafter, famous that knowledge confirmed that eliminating the laws will simplify the certification course of with out jeopardizing the general educational success of student-athletes, as student-athletes will nonetheless be required to satisfy a number of different educational necessities. “
- NCAA President Charlie Baker highlighted the modernization and development of faculty sports activities in his 2025 State of Faculty Sports activities deal with. Learn extra right here.
