Hey guys, currently looking for colleges. I would like to be a doctor and either major in bio or biochem for my undergrad. I would also like to wrestle at college at either a diii or dii level and have been having trouble finding a school that meets both my academic and athletic needs. I have a 96 unweighted average and have been looking at JHU, but am unsure if I would get in. Have yet to take the SAT, but got a 1250 on my PSAT with no prep. I have been studying for the actual SAT and would take it in March. Any suggestions of good academic schools with a DII/DIII wrestling program would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! 
JHU presently is presently out of reach for you academically, but an SAT above 1400 with your 96 average could change that. Might also depend on how good of a wrestler you are and if you’d be considered a recruited athlete. Wesleyan would be a decent choice if you can get SAT up into the 1360-1400 range. Ithaca College is a better match for your present score levels, but they have a pretty strong wrestling team as well. Need to also consider location, cost, etc.
Not sure your home state, but TCNJ has strong sciences and D3 wrestling. Muhlenberg in PA is another.
Franklin & Marshall ?
Develop a list of schools that fit you (academics, location, size, cost). Understand the grades and test scores expected based upon these school’s websites and Common Data set. Then from this list see which have wrestling programs and the quality of their wrestling team. Once you have narrowed the list, contact the coaches directly through email with academic and wrestling stats and achievements. Include wrestling match videos.
If you want school suggestions here, tell us geographic and cost considerations. You will need to get your SAT up to at least approaching 1400 to open up opportunities at decent academic schools unless you are a multiple year state champion level wrestler.
If you are a competitive wrestler, consider a Big Ten university & Division I wrestling.
You may find Division III wrestling practices easier than at your high school.
You can play DI in a non-revenue sport & study as much as needed.
In addition to creating a list of target schools (which you can start now and broaden search once you have SAT results) and directly contacting coaches (fill out online recruiting questionnaires and followup with emails), you and your parents have to have a good understanding of your annual college budget. As you likely know, there are athletic scholarships at DI/II schools and none at DIII schools.
I am also going to link to a helpful NCAA report. It has a lot of data, but take a look at median hours spent by athletes both in their sport (starting p. 32), as well as time spent on academics. When you add those numbers together, there is not much time left in a given week. Yes, in-season athletic time commitment is lower in DIII (28.5 hrs DIII vs. 32 DII vs. 34 DI, but that’s still a lot. This report surveyed 21K+ student athletes in 2015 (also completed in 2010 and 2006), and will be updated this year. http://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/GOALS_convention_slidebank_jan2016_public.pdf
Good luck!
If you are an outstanding wrestler, then consider a PG year at one of the two major prep school powerhouses in order to get a DI scholarship or into an Ivy wrestling program.
Disagree, disagree, and disagree (sorry P, we’re usually on the same page). If you are not nationally ranked, you aren’t getting anywhere near a Big Ten wrestling room. I wrestled in a D3 room. Unless you are at Blair, it will not be easier. The beginners and the weak guys are gone. Wrestling is, by a mile, the most difficult sport to combine with academics.
If you are wanting a shot at med school, you will need to attend a college where you will get mostly A grades in your core science courses. JHU is really hard. The average SAT is 1510. Are you confident you will be in the top 25% or so of that group?
Look at the list of colleges with D3 wrestling. Figure out which ones you would be happy to attend without wrestling and where you are likely to get good grades. Lastly, see if you can fit wrestling into that by contacting coaches.
A PG year at Blair Academy or at Wyoming Seminary will get you into a Big Ten, Columbia, Cornell, etc. wrestling program if you are good enough to start. (I think Duke may have a wrestling team as well.)
When I was a freshman in college, the coach would only let me wrestle one person on our team (he was afraid that I would hurt the other wrestlers as I was very good with upper body throws) who happened to be the national champion at our weight. Our Heavyweight was also a DIII national champion. Even though the team won the league championship &, after I left, the national championship–the time commitment & practices were a joke.
I also practiced with another college team while in high school which concurrently won the DIII national championship. That school’s practices were similar to our high school practices–serious & demanding, but not enough so as to interfere with academics.
Go Division I for wrestling if you are serious about the sport. While you may never start, you will learn how to compete & train.
P.S. If you are not quick & unusually strong, then I agree that DI is not an option.
I’m not sure how recent @Publisher experience was, but that doesn’t really match up with what I have seen, and S is a HS senior that recently completed the recruiting process. I personally know multiple guys who were cut from D1 and high end D2 wrestling teams for not being committed enough, and they were practice room guys who still spent a ton of time on wrestling. Maybe at a high academic D3 like Wesleyan or Williams, or even a lower academic bD2 or D3 that doesn’t have a competitive team you can get away without a huge commitment if you are talented enough, even then I’m not sure. In the B1G even at Northwestern you are an athlete first and a student second. They probably will say otherwise, but that is the reality if you talk to the athletes away from the coaches.
I know a recent D1 wrestler who is in optometry school now, I assume he had a pretty good GPA for that. But he was at a very easy academic school. I think the combination of premed and wrestling at a D1 level is a recipe for failure for 90%+ of people who try it.
I’ve got quite a bit of recent info on wresting programs at all 3 levels, as well as NAIA. Both high academic and high athletic programs. We really talked to coaches across the whole spectrum because early on I want sure where he would fit athletically. Plus we have spent enough time with wrestling people the last several years that I know kids currently in programs across the country at all levels.
I think only 2% of high school wrestlers make it to college at any level including juco. If you want some help assessing your fit, I’m happy to help. I don’t think you have enough messages to pm, but if you get up to I think 15 posts you can pm me more detailed info if you are more comfortable sharing it that way.
Good luck!
I also think the time commitment for D3 is higher than high school - and my son won a team state championship 2 years in high school. It was a serious high school team, but i know several of the boys currently in D1 (one B1G) and it’s a serious time commitment. His best friend got 3 days home for Xmas, then was back at it. One is an engineering major and said the average GPA among wrestlers majoring in engineering was 2.5. There are mandatory study hours, but wrestling definitely comes first.
My son ended up going to a school with a club team and that’s been the right decision for him. 2-3 practices a week, you miss when you have to, even if you’re not very good you’re still welcome to come and work out. They travel to the juco nationals every year (and usually get destroyed by the Last Chance U types) but he’s made great friends and it’s been the right balance for him with academics. If you’re not looking at scholarship money for wrestling, you might consider that option.
Certainly at Iowa & Penn State wrestling is one’s priority, but at Northwestern & Columbia, for examples with which I am recently familiar, you are a student first & a wrestler second.
DIII programs will not interfere with academics at all.
P.S. My high school experience was in a state where wrestling is a major sport & at a high school which is usually ranked in the top 5 nationally.
@dadof4kids: Why not share school recommendations on this thread so that all can benefit from your knowledge & experience ?
P.S. For example, what is your opinion regarding F&M wrestling & its suitability for OP ?
I do agree that wrestling today is less competitive than when I was active. Even the Olympics tried to eliminate wrestling as an Olympic sport.
Many colleges & universities have eliminated wrestling as an intercollegiate sport due to funding & compliance issues.
Wrestlers from my prep school often go abroad to train during the summer months in Eastern Europe & former Soviet Union countries which I cannot spell. There used to be great training in states like Ohio & Pennsylvania & Oklahoma. In the US, many athletes forego wrestling & boxing for American football; there is no competing draw beyond the US borders so elite athletes in other countries participate more often & in greater numbers in wrestling & boxing.
Specific School recommendations are pretty tough given the information that we have. That’s why I offered to do it over pm. More for his benefit of being able to share information that might help give a better recommendation. I really have no way to judge if F & M is out of his League, or if it is below his abilities. My understanding is it is a tough grading school, which isn’t great for pre-med. But it’s not one I looked at closely so I don’t have very good information to give.
Northwestern has more in common with its big ten counterparts then the ivy league, at least under the current coach. The results show that. I think your understanding of Columbia is probably correct at least until a couple years ago. I know that the coach is pretty actively trying to change that culture and trying to weed out the athletes who aren’t committed to the sport during the recruiting process.
I don’t know anything about Franklin & Marshall that isn’t publicly available, so I don’t have much to add on that particular School. They don’t give scholarships and were one of the few schools to qualify zero athletes to D1’s the last time I checked that stat a couple years ago, so they may be more lax on their commitment. It’s kind of a weird set up, I don’t know why they are choosing to be an awful D1 without scholarships instead of just competing as a D3.
I wouldn’t say wrestling is less competitive than it used to be, in fact it almost certainly is tougher to get scholarship money than it used to be. The actual raw number of NCAA athletes in wrestling has stayed surprisingly consistent over the last 30 years. But there has been a huge drop in the proportion of those which are D1. I don’t know about number of programs, but the number of athletes participating has risen in D2 and D3 approximately the same amount that number has fallen in D1. Since we’re talking about D2 and D3, that means less money available.
Somewhat off topic but with respect to schools dropping wrestling and the redistribution to D 2 and 3 I can see NCAA wrestling moving in the direction that NCAA Water Polo has, one single division for NCAA Championships.
Water polo has done this due to the small number of schools sponsoring the sport. There are still conferences and traditional schedules/rivalries but the year end tournament is “one size fits all”. Granted there are around 250 wrestling schools across all divisions as opposed to just 42 for water polo but that can change quickly. Wrestling was almost lost from the Olympics (still a thin line keeping it) and is an easy cut to make under title IX (no female offset sport for the most part).
Should this happen the D 2 and 3 schools really get hurt. Granted they get to compete against the best however the chances to make it to the NCAA Championship becomes a very remote possibility. The D 1 schools (and D 2) can still offer scholarships and have much bigger budgets for recruiting and that name recognition giving them the built in edge. The advantage is for that elite athlete that wants/needs that small school education can get it while still competing against the creme of the crop. It will be interesting to see what happens if the sport continues to struggle to stay relevant.
At least at the high school level, some schools have added female wrestling teams.
Several years ago, Northwestern had a great coach who suddenly & without explanation left NU. One elite high school program then stopped feeding their star wrestlers to NU & switched to Columbia and some other schools including Duke.
We have friends whose son is graduating from Wyoming Seminary this year. He was a repeat sophomore,so in essence an extra year. Here are the schools for 2019: Pitt, Bucknell, Harvard, UPenn, Cornell, Hofstra, Oklahoma.
Almost completely off topic, but just to vent to other wrestling fans. I had made plans to go spend the day Saturday with a couple buddies and see Montini Catholic (#5 on intermat) and Wyoming Seminary (#2) wrestle a tri tournament at St Eds (#8). Then Montini pulled out and Wyoming can’t travel for a straight dual tournament. So now it is likely I will spend the day with the honey do list instead 