Attention must be paid...

The CIS comes in for criticism, much of it justified, but it deserves praise when you read how tough it's been to get women's wrestling accepted as a full-fledged NCAA sport.

No doubt the pioneering female wrestlers in Canada encounted their share of opposition, maybe a little bit of ridicule, but the point it was that way back in the last century. Honestly, as a sports nut, it was like one day wrestling was a single-gender sport, and the next day it wasn't.

And of course, a CIS alumna, Brock grad Tonya Verbeek, won an Olympic silver medal in the Athens in 2004. It should be acknowledged and it should be something we should be proud of, that the decision-makers were open-minded and realized

Here's hoping the NCAA get its. Apparently, it won't even include women's wrestling as an "emerging sport," but it's interested in adding women's volleyball. Gee, why would that be?

Related:
Women Want to Wrestle; Small Colleges Oblige (Katie Thomas, The New York Times, May 27)
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3 comments:

  1. Just to clarify: they're considering adding women's beach volleyball. Women's volleyball is one of the bigger NCAA sports (and it steals a lot of players from Canada: a coach I've spoken with estimated that about 50% of Canadian female volleyball prospects go to the States).

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  2. Wanna bet which sport the NCAA adds first?

    Thing with beach volleyball is only a few schools (Florida and Cali school) could have any kind of season.

    Wrestling's just as worth considering. The Times story said there's 5,000 girls doing it in U.S. high schools, plus there are others in Canada.

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  3. Hey, I agree that wrestling's probably a better choice at the moment for the NCAA than beach volleyball, which has the problems you mentioned. Indoor volleyball thrives in the NCAA, though, which is what I was talking about, and beach volleyball could be a good fit down the road: it would be excellent for training and developing Olympic athletes, as they're forced to choose most of the current beach players from the indoor ranks, and the games are dramatically different. Wrestling and beach volleyball aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, though: I think there could be room for both.

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