The New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference has suspended conference play and championships in winter sports while allowing schools to schedule outside competition as conditions allow. NEWMAC schools with wrestling include Coast Guard, Springfield, and WPI. Each of these schools has made a statement suggesting they plan to explore the possibility of wrestling this season, so they will not be added to the list of canceled seasons.

Coast Guard: “Similar to the fall sports season, CGA will look to expand our scheduling alliance with the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and we are open to other potential opponents provided they agree to the same rigorous conditions of competition that were established in the fall. While the winter sports season will look very different, the Athletic Division is committed to providing safe and meaningful athletic experiences for all of our cadet-athletes.

Springfield: “We remain committed to pursuing avenues for Springfield College student-athletes to engage in intercollegiate competition in all of our winter sports, including NEWMAC and non-NEWMAC affiliated programs.”

WPI: “WPI will look to do limited scrimmages and/or contests in the winter sports of men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s and women’s indoor track and field and wrestling in late February/March if conditions and guidelines are allowable.”

The Division III Presidents Council approved a blanket waiver for Division III athletes for the 2020-2021 school year. Athletes may participate in any amount of competition, up to the regularly established maximum for a sport, without being charged a season of competition. For wrestling, an athlete may now compete in up to 16 dates up competition without using any athletic eligibility. This follows a previous recommendation for the waiver from the DIII Management Council earlier this month

Presidents Council approves blanket waiver for all DIII student-athletes

The Division III Management Council has recommended that all Division III athletes be granted a waiver allowing competition this year without using a season of eligibility. President’s Council will review the recommendation on October 28th.

The Division III Management Council is forwarding a recommendation to the Presidents Council to allow all Division III student-athletes to compete up to the established dates of competition/contest maximums without being charged a season of intercollegiate participation for this academic year.

Management Council recommends blanket waiver for all DIII student-athletes

Prior to this recommendation, a waiver from the summer allowed athletes to compete in up to half the allowed number of competitions without using a season. Now, any amount of competition, up to the typically allowed 16 dates of competition for wrestling, will not trigger the use of a season of competition.

The same group also approved the recommendation to limit championships to 75% of their original capacity. Pending final approval, this will limit the NCAA Wrestling Championships to 135 participants, down from 180.

October 1st marked the first day of official training for the 2020-2021 season. Usually, the start date is October 10th, but the NCAA has allowed some additional flexibility due to the uncertainty imposed by COVID-19. Additionally, rather than allowing a 19 week season where activity on a single day uses up a week, DIII teams in all sports are instead working with a 114 day season where each day of practice or competition counts only for itself.

Some schools are currently training without contact. Others are wrestling in small groups. Some are surely training as usual. Some schools are entirely or mostly online. If those schools are practicing, they are doing so without most of their wrestlers on campus.

As each school navigates the pandemic in its own way, there are a lot of questions about how the season will look, and many of them do not have answers. Some schools have postponed all fall semester competition. Others are competing in non-contact sports only, while a few are moving ahead with all sports and scheduling games where they can. The first DIII football game of the year happened on Saturday when Trine beat Adrian. Here are some questions that will be answered in time as the season progresses.

1. When will the proposed regional alignment be finalized? There are seven new teams this year: Carthage, Elmira, Emory & Henry, Hiram, Iowa Wesleyan, New Jersey City, and Shenandoah. A regional alignment has been proposed but still awaits final approval.
2. What happens after Thanksgiving? Many schools are either finishing the semester then or moving all instruction online following the holiday. This could create a scenario where wrestlers train until Thanksgiving but then take a break until they return for the second semester. At minimum, that would be a month off between November 26th and December 26th.
3. How will wrestlers qualify for the NCAA Championships? The field will, pending final approval, be lowered from 180 to 135 athletes this year, though the six regions will still be contested. Will the qualifiers per weight be announced before the events, or will the DIII Wrestling Committee select some number of qualifiers after the regionals? (As an aside, the reduction in field size will result in approximately $40,000-$50,000 in savings to the NCAA based on estimates of per diem, transportation, participant awards, and other expenses)
4. How will qualifiers be allocated? With six regions, qualifying the top two (maybe after a true 2nd match) takes care of 120 of the 135 qualifiers. Allocating the other 15, either before or after the regionals, will be a challenge, especially given #5 below.
5. How many matches will the athletes get? The answer will be different in each conference for sure. Some teams may not compete at all. Others may compete a lot more. Large tournaments seem unlikely, and if some schools only begin to compete in early to mid January, a large number of wrestlers will approach the postseason with low double digit matches and limited chances for competition among top contenders at each weight. This will complicate any attempt to allocate at-large bids to the championships.
6. What sort of testing will take place? The NCAA COVID-19 Advisory Group released a set of guidelines for basketball suggesting that athletes and those who work closely with them be tested three times per week during the season. While it is only a guideline, any school adapting this suggestion for wrestling will need to come up with a way to pay for a lot of tests. According to NCAA data, the average DIII team in 2018-19 had 27.2 athletes. Add in some coaches and that could be as many as 90 tests a week for the duration of the season.
7. Finally, how many teams will compete this season, and when will schools make that decision? School presidents and conference commissioners will work together to determine who can play and when. How students return to campus in January, what sort of return-to-play protocol is employed, and when competitions can begin will affect the start of the 2021 season.

The NCAA Division III Championships Committee has affirmed their prior recommendation to limit field sizes for the 2021 winter and spring championships. For wrestling, this means that the committee recommended reducing the number of qualifiers from 180 to 135. This recommendation will go to the DIII Management Council for approval at their October 19-20 meeting.

The recommendation comes as the NCAA continues to deal with the fallout of losing hundreds of millions of dollars of TV revenue due to the cancellation of the DI Men’s Basketball championship tournament. See more about the NCAA’s financial situation. The NCAA was expecting to take in over $800 million from March Madness TV contracts. As a result, Division III will receive $22 million less than last year. The Division III budget is primarily used to conduct championships. For a look at how NCAA finances work under normal circumstances, head to Where Does the Money Go?

It is worth mentioning that the changes to the championship field are not designed to reduce risk of contracting COVID-19. It is purely a financial decision to deal with the lost revenue as well as increased costs due to sanitization procedures and testing. How the field will be determined is still an open question. If the top two at each region qualify, that still leaves 15 spots in the field of 135. Assigning those spots will be a challenge given the nature of a shortened season where most competition is likely to be regional. Once the reduced field size becomes official, the DIII Wrestling Committee will likely begin to develop a plan for determining which 135 wrestlers will compete in the 2021 championships.

In their meeting earlier this week, the NCAA Division III Championships Committee recommended limiting all winter and spring championships to 75% of their standard capacity. This applies equally to team and individual sports. If the proposal were to go into effect for wrestling, the NCAA bracket would be reduced from 180 athletes to 135.

Before this proposal becomes reality, feedback will be solicited from the various sport committees. Then the Management and Presidents Councils will make the final decision. This decision could come next month.

Putting this proposal into action for wrestling would require a significant reworking of the qualification procedures. Presently, the top three wrestlers in each weight from each of six regions qualifies into a bracket of 18 competitors. Dropping from 180 to 135 could result in the return of some sort of at-large selections as well as true-second matches at the regional tournaments.

The cost of hosting championships and budget constraints related to COVID-19 are the driving factors behind this proposal. Hosting all rounds of winter and spring championships at predetermined sites and enhanced testing and sanitation protocols will add $9 million to the championships budget for 2020-2021, and reducing field sizes has been proposed to help limit expenses. Division III had already experienced a $7.6 million budget shortfall for 2019-2020 as a result of the cancellation of winter and spring championships.

Proposal caps brackets at 75% for Division III winter, spring championships