By Jim Carlson | Special to PennLive
The blood, sweat and — perhaps -- fears that went into planning the 2020 NCAA Wrestling Championships will be rewarded before the first whistle resonates through U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on March 19. Before any points are scored in the three-day, six-session marquee event that caps the college wrestling season, a record will not just be broken but obliterated.
NCAA officials already have learned – at more than three months out -- that if they hold the sport’s most colossal function in a professional football stadium, people will come. How many remains to be seen, but it’s more than a safe assumption to think that the six-session record of 113,743 set in Cleveland in 2018 will fall during the Friday morning quarterfinal round, and the single-session mark of 19,776 will tumble before the opening pigtail bouts.
While colleges such as Penn State and other wrestling powers have requested more tickets each year and yet received fewer each time, the NCAA already has sold about 18,000 tickets to the general public. Anthony Holman, NCAA Managing Director of Championships and Alliance, said, typically, only 1,000 to 1,500 tickets are available to public buyers.
Holman said a total figure of tickets sold could number 43,000 to 44,000. “To get to that 43/44,000 number, they're taking the 18,000 – roughly -- that we sold to the general public, and then the 20-plus thousand that are being held for institution allotments and then another 2,300 or so that are part of suites (144 of them) that are also already sold out,” Holman said.
“That number is accurate with the assumption and understanding that the institutions who have historically requested 300 times the number of tickets we've had available, is the assumption that they take all of the tickets that are made available to them. Yeah, we’ll be at that 43 number for sure.”
Holman said the committee did its homework while looking for the 2020 championship location.
“We were coming off of six consecutive years of sellouts and venues that were between 15,000 to 18,000, and the demand for tickets continued to grow,” he said. “We were historically cutting the number of tickets that were requested by our institutions by 40 and 50%. So, we thought that capacity was certainly something that was important to provide an opportunity to give folks an opportunity to celebrate this wonderful championship.”
Holman said recent locations such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis and New York City have been “nice,” but floor space and competition space as well as space for student-athletes to lounge between competitions has been lacking. Huge NFL locker rooms, as Holman explained it, will help remedy that.
An advantage for the NCAA wrestling administrators leading up to this season’s championships March 19-21, 2020 was that U.S. Bank Stadium was the site of the 2019 NCAA Basketball Championships. Attendance in the 66,655-seat stadium was 72,711 for the semifinals April 6 and 72,062 for the finals April 8.
No one expects any individual wrestling session to come close to that, but tickets sold for six wrestling sessions could outnumber basketball’s two sessions by well over 100,000. Lessons learned, Holman said, aside from providing more opportunities for fans to attend, are the in-venue amenities such as larger video boards and ribbon boards, a larger concourse, more entry points, more restrooms and more points of sale for concessions.
“That's certainly a great takeaway that we learned from men's basketball,” Holman said. “The other part that we learned from in basketball was as you grow your championship and the concerns around safety and security increase, giving yourself more space for ingress/egress is absolutely a great thing around our security plans and being in U.S. Bank Stadium allows us to do that.”
Other numbers Holman had in his head is that, annually, the wrestling championship has 85 to 90% repeat attendees, and in some years, it’s reached 93%.
“It's been it's been a focused and concentrated effort in places where we’ve gone -- to New York, for example -- where we had 22% first-time attendees there. We're hoping to see that number increase even greater in Minnesota, and that's intentional,” Holman said.
“We certainly love and appreciate our are avid fans, but we want to introduce the sport in this tremendous championship to the next generation of fans as well and being in Minnesota will give us that opportunity to do that.”
Holman said coaches he’s spoken with are excited about the venue as well. “They recognize that this is the greatest wrestling championship in the world,” he said. “We've been to the Olympics, we’ve been to World Championships, and no other championship is being conducted in venues this size at this number of attendees, this amount of broadcast and media coverage.
“Our coaches recognize that, they understand that and they appreciate it; they want to celebrate it and they want others to be a part of this celebration of collegiate wrestling. I think they've really been embracing it.”
The eight mats that are used will be centered in the middle of the playing field inside the stadium, Holman said, even though that wasn’t the original plan.
“We were thinking the East end zone is how we had it set up,” he said. “But what we realized quickly was, here we are having a chance to have over 20,000 100-level seats, but we're going to take 14,000 of them or 12,000 of them offline, if we move it all the way to one end.
“By moving the mats to the center and spreading them out, we get to take advantage of all those 100-level seats and very similar to what you have in an arena.”
Sites for the 2021 and 2022 championships are St. Louis and Detroit, respectively. The bid process for 2023 and beyond opened in August and will close in mid-February, Holman said. Future sites won’t be announced until late summer.
“Does it mean if this is successful, that we will continue to go to stadiums? I don't know if we're married to that necessarily,” Holman said. “I think our committee will continue to try and identify facilities, locations, other things that are consistent with the strategic plan, which was big on bringing in the next generation of fans, providing ample space for our student-athletes, providing additional capacity for our fans and our institutions.
“I think, again, no promises, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other opportunities around stadiums going forward should this be successful,” he said.
