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Without in-state college programs to recruit them, Florida's top talents struggle to gain national attention.
By BRANT JAMES
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 12, 2001
As a youngster growing up in Tampa, Glenn Goodman used to pile into the family car with his father, off to see his heroes and role models in a sport he would come to master.
The venues weren't Tampa Stadium or Al Lang Field. They were wrestling mats at the University of Tampa or Florida before the programs became extinct by the late 1960s and early '70s.
Goodman, 39, went on to set a Florida record with 111 wins (and no losses) and became the first in the state to win four high school championships. He won youth world titles and a Pan American Games gold medal, but was widely regarded as an aberration, a phenomenal product of a wrestling-poor region, by the Midwestern states where the sport is beyond a craze.
But nearly a decade after Goodman helped show that Florida is fertile wrestling territory, the state's top prospects struggle, not only to find their identity as youngsters, but to market themselves as potential collegians.
And it all radiates from the demise of college wrestling in Florida, Goodman said.
"When I was a kid wrestler, there were a lot of universities around with wrestling and there is a trickle-down effect," he said. "First, you need to see good, quality wrestling. And what would happen is the wrestlers that would graduate would stay local and go into coaching. So you'd have a lot of ex-college wrestlers coaching, which we don't have now. When I got to high school, there was still a lot of college wrestlers, so I would train with college wrestlers. We don't have any of that trickle down now."
Jim Zalesky, coach of fifth-ranked Iowa, said the loss of the top level erodes the foundation.
"It definitely hurts them," he said. "If Florida did not have any college football programs, would they be as good in high school football? I don't think so."
The problem is, those in-state college wrestling programs are unlikely to return in an age of budget cuts and Title IX. The number of NCAA institutions sponsoring wrestling programs has decreased in 19 of the past 20 years and is now at 227 (I-A through I-AAA), down from 363 in 1981-82.
The situation is more bleak in the Southeast, where no programs exist between Citadel in Charleston, S.C., and the University of Puerto Rico-Bayamon.
Jared Frayer never got the chance to see big-time college wrestling until he was part of it, as a member of an Oklahoma team that now, in his senior year, is ranked third in the nation.
"I can't imagine what it would have been like to have seen a college match, with the best in the country going mano a mano in front of 10,000 people," said Frayer, a former state champion at Countryside who's ranked second in the nation at 149 pounds. "Who wouldn't want to be part of that?"
The route is not easy for Floridians who do. There are five Floridians wrestling on four teams ranked in the top 10 nationally.
States such as Iowa, Oklahoma, Ohio and Pennsylvania are indisputably deeper than Florida, but wrestlers such as Frayer can be mined. The trick is merging recruit and scout, and, Goodman said, overcoming some stigmas.
"I think our state is discounted a little bit," he said. "We're viewed in the mean. For wrestling states in the South, we're real strong. They'll look at us, but not as much as in the big wrestling states."
Zalesky said the last time an Iowa coach scouted Florida was "once, a very, very long time ago," and having only three part-time recruiters often limits the scouting range to the home state and the wrestling heartland.
That forces parents and coaches to become skilled marketers and increases pressure to travel to national events where scouts convene to maximize budgets.
Frayer was a regular at these events from age 9, but former Brandon state champion Josh Lambrecht, ranked No. 1 nationally at 189 pounds for the Sooners, didn't begin circulating until he was a senior.
That, said Frayer's father, Countryside coach Dave Frayer, was why Lambrecht had to start his career at Tennessee-Chattanooga and transfer to Oklahoma.
"He didn't go to the national tournaments until he was a senior; he didn't go to camps," Dave Frayer said.
"He was a state champ and he was tough, but (Oklahoma) didn't know about him until he got to college and they couldn't talk to him until he requested a transfer. When it came time to go out and sell Jared at the end of his junior year, everybody knew about him, whereas (Lambrecht) probably could have had more success getting there had he gone out and sold himself on the national scene."
"A lot of kids (in Florida) just think college coaches should be there looking at them," Jared Frayer said. "They need to know they need to get their name out and their tapes out."
Frayer and Lambrecht are perfect examples of how any state's products can flourish with the proper resources. There are pockets of talent around the state -- Clearwater, Brandon, Miami, Spring Hill, for example -- specifically, those with active youth programs that provide those resources, but they are rare.
"Ten guys from Florida wrestled in the NCAA (tournament) last year; there were nine from Oklahoma," Frayer said. "People here couldn't believe that when I told them that."
Five Floridians -- including Countryside's Matt Turtzo -- won championships in the high school division of the Sooners' Oklahoma Open recently.
If only, Jared Frayer said, Floridians could siphon just a bit of the Midwest's zeal for his sport.
"I think Florida has the best athletes in the country," he said, "but they just don't have the resources. If wrestling was seen more. . .
"The few that have made it, they show the sport is ready to explode in the state. We could be as big as anybody in the country."