NO HOLDS BARRED

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman speaks with former NCAA Div. I All-American wrestler at Indiana, and current Assistant Professor of Sport Administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Coyte Cooper.

As a former top-level college wrestler and with a PhD in Sport Management, he is using his unique set of skills and experience to work with the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA) to develop research to help enhance the sustainability of college wrestling programs. This is an especially critical task since literally hundreds of college wrestling programs in the U.S. have been closed down over the past few decades. Towards these goals, he authored the recently-published NWCA Marketing Manual. This can be downloaded for free online here.

We spoke with Coyte Cooper by phone Thursday afternoon about the need for college wrestling to step up its marketing efforts, and now.

"Coaches have to take control of things," he said in this interview. "The way that wrestling is going to grow in the future is if we do it at the grassroots level, meaning coaches take that proactive approach where they start to really value what marketing is."

We discussed a lot in this interview, including the need for wrestling coaches to embrace a marketing mindset; how this requires the wrestling coaches to view themselves as CEOs of their programs; why a culture change in college wrestling is necessary to accomplish this; why effective use of social media such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook is essential today; the need for coaches to delegate many of these tasks to people at their schools whether or not those people are wrestlers; the recent controversy about crowning a national team champion through a dual meet tournament rather than through the existing national tournament; and much more.

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