As a boy growing up in Everett, Alec Bird always wanted to attend the University of Washington. And as he grew into a top athlete, he dreamed of one day competing for the Huskies.
But that dream went out the window when Bird decided that his college sport would be wrestling. Because although Washington has a vast athletic department — 19 varsity teams for men and women — the school does not have intercollegiate wrestling.
Neither does Washington State University nor any of the state’s other four-year colleges and universities. The only state schools to offer intercollegiate wrestling are Highline and Yakima Valley community colleges.
As a result, Bird now attends the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., where he is a redshirt freshman on the Orediggers wrestling team.
“My parents are both UW alums and that was always my favorite college team when I was growing up,” said Bird, a 2010 Everett High School graduate and a two-time high school state wrestling champion. “If they had a wrestling program, that’s where I would’ve been.”
Instead, Bird faced a choice common to many of the state’s top senior wrestlers. He could either give up the sport and stay close to home to attend a four-year school, or he could head out of state and continue to wrestle.
Bird decided to wrestle, in part because the Orediggers offered a partial athletic scholarship. But other wrestlers from around the state, including dozens every year from high schools in and around Snohomish County, end up leaving the sport.
Brent Barnes, the longtime wrestling coach at Lake Stevens, knows the dilemma facing high school wrestlers in Washington because he faced it himself. Barnes graduated from Puyallup’s Rogers High School in 1980, which happened to be the same year Washington dropped its intercollegiate program. He had been recruited by the UW, but instead went to a junior college in Idaho and then to Oklahoma State University, a perennial national wrestling power.
Before relocating to Oklahoma, “I’d never been out of the Pacific Northwest,” Barnes said. “I was not a cowboy, so it was a totally different culture. It was really hard, and during that time I always dreamed about how great it would’ve been to be wrestling for the Huskies, 45 minutes away from my house in Puyallup, and having my family come and watch me compete.”
Because Lake Stevens is a state wrestling power, Barnes sends a lot of kids on to college programs. But some of his elite wrestlers have also dropped the sport after high school. Like Josh Monson, who in 2008, but gave up wrestling to attend Washington, where he is pursuing high academic goals.
Another Lake Stevens product, Josh Heinzer, was a three-time state champ at Lake Stevens who graduated in 2010. He was determined to stick with wrestling and enrolled at Iowa Central CC with the goal of going on to a top national four-year program.
Despite going halfway across the country for school, the experience “has been great,” Heinzer said. “I wanted to come to a place where I could be successful and I was, so I can’t really be too bummed about that.”
Of the senior wrestlers in a typical Western Conference season, only a small percentage go on to wrestle in college. Some choose to be strictly students at in-state schools, while others miss out on the chance to compete simply because of the diminishing number of programs in the country.
In the Pacific Northwest, Oregon State, Boise State and Southern Oregon are among the few four-year schools with intercollegiate programs (Simon Fraser in Vancouver, B.C. also has wrestling). Oregon dropped its wrestling program in 2008, Portland State the next year.
For that reason, said Everett coach Brien Elliott, kids from this state who want to wrestle in college need to be proactive in creating their own opportunities, including going to national tournaments to get exposure with college coaches.
“There has to be a plan,” Elliott said. “You can’t just finish wrestling in high school and then decide you want to go to college. It’s too late. You have to start as early as the freshman year.”
Compared to prospective recruits in sports like football or basketball, “there’s a lot more work that goes into this,” said Elliott, who instructs his athletes to send out portfolios and e-mails to college coaches. “Because the athletes do not pick the college, the college picks you.”
In that respect, Bird is one of the lucky ones. A strong student who is majoring in chemical and biochemical engineering, he used his academic and athletic success to get an opportunity to wrestle collegiately.
Being at a state school “would’ve been a lot cheaper, and it would’ve been a lot easier to go back (home) and see my family,” he said. “So it just would’ve made it all a lot more convenient.”
But in high school, Bird said, “wrestling really turned into my favorite sport. It was something I loved doing and I wanted to keep going with it. I’m real happy I made the choice I did. It’s worked out pretty well for me.”
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