Grappling With Female Wrestling As States Re-Open

July 5, 2020,

Conversations focused on sports in 2020 are filled with fuzzy question marks.

There is very little clarity. There is a need for more. We are in uncharted territory.

Will there be a NFL season and in pandemic times, what in the world will it look like?

CBS Sports appears to have some insight. They relate, “The NFL isn't backing down from its hope of a season in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, despite facing a new set of problems and dwindling time to get everything figured out.”

Very fuzzy.

It’s a huge hope and seemingly not a realistic one.

It has to be very complicated. Football is the ultimate collision sport and the person that you tested last month for the coronavirus, who was uninfected, now may be.

Then there is the liability from both the fans and the players.

Unless players are completely isolated from the public, including their families, all year long and tested every day, it would impossible to play a full season in 2020.

Will players have to quarantine before camps, which are scheduled to begin in late July? How often will players be tested during camp and the regular season? What if a player tests positive? How many positive tests will determine that the season needs to shut down?

The stakes certainly are very high.

According to Forbes Magazine, “The NFL would lose $5.5 billion of stadium revenue (the sum of tickets, concessions, sponsors, parking and team stores)—or 38% of its total revenue—based on figures for the 2018 season (ranking below).”

That’s quite a pinch.

grapplingstars.com, femcompetitor.com fciwomenswrestling.com articles, Dallas Cowboys photo credit

The Dallas News adds, “NFL teams print money, thanks to their television contracts. Last year, NFL teams received $274.3 million from their national TV deals, up from the $255 million in 2018. The Cowboys’ $950 million in revenue in 2018 was an increase from $864 million in 2017, according to Forbes.”

It would be ashamed to see much of that go away.

Football is not alone. No sport is immune, including our wonderful world of female grappling.

Previous to the pandemic the growth of female freestyle grappling was surging sky high.

The Modesto Bee shared, “In 2018-19, high school participation in the sport declined for the first time in 30 years but girls wrestling increased by 27%, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. There were 21,124 girls who wrestled last year compared to 16,562 during the 2017-18 year. In California, there were almost 1,000 new girl wrestlers in 2019 while the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section has doubled its participation from 2016 (540) to this year (1,095).”

That is fantastic news. Pre-pandemic. Here is another.

The theintelligencer.net educates, “The fastest-growing sport in the nation has reached the Ohio Valley. It was recently announced that Steubenville High School will field a girls’ wrestling team for the 2020-21 school year. The team will be led by Big Red boys’ coach Mike Blackburn and Tommie Goff, an Akron Copley graduate who led the junior high program last season at Harding Middle School.”

So, with all of this great news, if there was ever a sport where two people are in close contact it is female grappling. In regards to testing, will they face the same dilemma as other sports, like the NFL?

We’ll turn to the United States Center for Disease Control for some suggestions on sports reopening.

They educate, “As some communities in the United States begin to start youth sports activities again, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers the following considerations for ways in which youth sports organizations can protect players, families, and communities and slow the spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The way sports are played, and the way equipment is shared can influence the spread of COVID-19 among players. When you are assessing the risk of spread in your sport, consider:

Physical closeness of players, and the length of time that players are close to each other or to staff. Sports that require frequent closeness between players may make it more difficult to maintain social distancing, compared to sports where players are not close to each other. For close-contact sports (e.g., wrestling, basketball), play may be modified to safely increase distance between players.

For example, players and coaches can:

Focus on individual skill building versus competition;

Limit the time players spend close to others by playing full contact only in game-time situations;

Decrease the number of competitions during a season.

Coaches can also modify practices so players work on individual skills, rather than on competition. Coaches may also put players into small groups (cohorts) that remain together and work through stations, rather than switching groups or mixing groups.”

Very sound advice.

This is of interest to our team at Grappling Stars because for the first time in quite some time we are planning on shooting some matches.

We have the budget to do it.

The first question we’ve asked ourselves is, for the women who will participate, are they willing to get tested first? If not, it will be a deal breaker. They cannot compete. Too, how soon should they be tested before the match? Timing is everything.

If you tested say 3 months ago, that may be too much time in between.

You could be tested and cleared on Monday, but if you’ve never had the virus before, you could contract it on Tuesday.

What if you have had the virus before and survived it. What are your chances of getting it again?

Here are what the reports are saying.

At statnews.com they posted, “To be clear, most experts do think an initial infection from the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, will grant people immunity to the virus for some amount of time. That is generally the case with acute infections from other viruses, including other coronaviruses.”

The team at elemental.medium.com adds, “Despite all the swirling uncertainties and inconsistencies surrounding immunity, scientists do agree that humans develop immunity to Covid-19. Long-term research is necessary to paint a clearer picture of the level of antibodies necessary to confer immunity and the duration of protection.”

The virus is just too new. We need more time.

In the meantime, in terms of close contact sports preparation, including female grappling, we just have to proceed cautiously.

But still proceed.