British wrestling has been moving in the wrong direction - away from its voluntaryist roots and towards state paternalism. This article examines the consequences of government's perverse hand in funding the sport of wrestling during the past decade.

For years British wrestling was competitive. Every village green held local wrestling matches and British wrestlers produced notable results on the world stage. Then, in 1969, the British Amateur Wrestling Association (BAWA) was organized to control that nation's Olympic representation. The government's Sports Council began funding the sport through grants to the BAWA. Eventually crippled by socialism, the sport of wrestling and individual athletes are the unintended casualties. Today things have never looked so bad for British Wrestling.

Introduction and Background

In June 1995, the author arrived in England from Ohio to study the privatization of prison schooling as a graduate student. As a former wrestler, former U.S. Air Force boxer, and active wrestling coach, the author contacted the BAWA to query opportunities for coaching. This quickly led to his appointment as Head Wrestling Coach at Baverstock Grant-Maintained School in September 1995 to succeed All-American Wrestler Mike Woods who founded the wrestling program at Baverstock in Birmingham, England.

Mr. Ackerman, a wealthy American private benefactor, had donated tens of thousands of pounds to the BAWA to promote wrestling in British schools. His son, an American student at the American School of London, was a high school wrestler and needed opponents at his beginner's level rather than the experienced American high school wrestlers through the Department of Defense Dependents Schools League in England in order to progress in his wrestling skills and to begin posting some wins.

American coaches were employed by the BAWA regions to help organize British Schools Wrestling, such as Chris Whelan from the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale and All-American college wrestler Mike Woods from New Jersey. Private coaches were also employed such as Granit Taropin, who spent alot of time trying to teach Nate Ackerman to wrestle.

Schools wrestling in England was pioneered in the Midlands at Baverstock Grant-Maintained School in 1994 when Baverstock's Director of Sport Graham Davies noticed a schools bus driver wearing a wrestling singlet. Subsequent queries led to the arrival of American Mike Woods who founded the wrestling team at Baverstock. Wrestling, as most school sports in England, never generated a lot of enthusiasm, but Graham Davies and Baverstock's Head Master C. Roger Perks remained dedicated to the sport during their tenures. As early as 1995, Baverstock had its first British Schoolboy Wrestling Champion in Daniel Cox; the school and wrestlers were featured on Nickelodean UK's "School of the Week"; and an award by Prime Minister John Majors was personally given to Graham Davies. By 1999, Baverstock had its first British Schoolgirl Wrestling Champion in Alicia Evans; Team Co-Captain James Crossley had gone to high school in America on an exchange; and Co-Captain Matthew Viney was not only British Schools Champion but also selected to become a member of the UK Cadet Squad.

Meanwhile, wrestling teams were popping up at other schools in the Midlands: Stuart Bathhurst Roman Catholic School, Bushloe High School, Wodensborough College of Technology, Croft Street JMI School, and Bilston Community College.

After the author retired from coaching due to a knee injury, Baverstock maintained its wrestling success under Coach Mark Lee and later Coach Aaron Clapp. Baverstock wrestlers Mark O'toole, Chris Hand, and the first giant and only remaining wrestler from the coaching days of Mike Woods - James Crossley, were selected to join the UK Cadet Squad. Only the Master of hindsight knew that Baverstock's wrestling success was quickly coming to an end.

Snoggery and Pokery

Very quickly, the privately funded plans to promote British Schools wrestling began to go awry. Not long after the introduction of wrestling as an athletic activity for high school boys and girls, several levels of the BAWA administrative hierarchy were engaged in questionable activities. Coaches were not being paid and school authorities were kept in confusion. Professor Wray Vamplew at De Montfort University in Leicester termed the fraudulent claims and pretenses to promote schools wrestling "snoggery and pokery". Consider these shocking examples from the English Midlands and Southern regions during the late 1990s:

Some British coaches paid themselves 35 pounds an hour and others 150 pounds a day for conducting wrestling seminars. Contrast this with others who worked elsewhere as volunteers without pay. Amerian coaches were often not paid their salaries and most eventually returned to the States without monies still owed them. This scenario played itself out for the sport of wrestling in practically every region of England during the late 1990s, but perhaps nowhere so extensive as in the Midlands.

In 1999, Bilston Community College in Wolverhampton maintained a website advertising their state-funded wrestling club, which was later found to be non-existent. For that reason, British wrestler Andrew Swindell could not wrestle at Bilston after he enrolled there that year as a student of sport science. The organizers of the scheme were those entrenched through existing clubs who saw a sly way to get their hands on additional state-channeled monies earmarked for schools wrestling.

Many were sucking up the money donated to promote schools wrestling, but they were not promoting schools wrestling. Pretenses were made in the name of schools wrestling and facades maintained, but most of the money went to non-school clubs and their coaches and/or star club wrestlers.

[this article is continued at www.JuryFury.com]