How USA Wrestling will host Senior National Championships in the COVID-era
DES MOINES – The sport of wrestling is eyeing a big opportunity in Coralville, Iowa, this weekend.
USA Wrestling’s Senior National Championships will be contested at Coralville’s Xtream Arena this weekend. The three-day event will feature hundreds of the nation’s best wrestlers in the Olympic disciplines: men’s and women’s freestyle and Greco-Roman.
They will do this even while the novel coronavirus pandemic persists.
“There’s been a lot of communication, a lot of planning,” Josh Schamberger, President of the Iowa City/Coralville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, told the Register this week. “If we didn’t feel like we could do it safely, we wouldn’t be involved.”
This will be USA Wrestling’s first major Senior-level competition since the World Health Organization labeled the outbreak a pandemic in March. The event, featuring a full contact sport, is being held in a state with an average case rate of 2,964 per 100,000 people, the 10th highest in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in an area that had one the nation’s highest case rates.
How, exactly, is this going to work?
With a lot of careful and thorough planning from virtually everybody involved.
'They're taking every precaution'
Ahead of this weekend, USA Wrestling regularly communicated with Schamberger’s team and Johnson County Public Health. They discussed various plans and mitigation strategies to ensure the safety of, first, the athletes, coaches, officials and other essential personnel, and, second, any secondary personnel who hoped to attend.
All essential personnel will undergo intense health screenings before entering the arena. There will be no testing, but guidelines state participants must not have shown signs or symptoms of COVID-19 in the past 14 days. If those in Tier 1 have recently had COVID-19, they must be cleared by their physician to compete.
Wrestlers will also be separated from fans — both groups will have different entrances and exits. Masks are mandatory, even for athletes (unless they're competing). Mats will be cleaned more than usual. Referees won’t raise the winners’ hands, but instead lift their own hand with the corresponding colored arm band to signal the winner.
The schedule was adjusted to limit the number of people inside. Xtream Arena seats 5,100, but Schamberger said capacity will only reach about 25% each day. Interviews with wrestlers will be conducted via Zoom.
“From a public health standpoint, they’re taking every precaution,” Dave Koch, Director of Johnson County Public Health, said this week. “They were very willing to work with us, share their plans — and they are very robust, I have to admit.
“And to their credit, they were also willing to pull the plug on this depending on the local numbers or the guidance we gave them.”
'There’s nothing magical or specific'
The Western States Championships were held at the Legacy Events Center in Farmington, Utah from July 30 through Aug. 1. The event featured a maximum of 750 wrestlers per day. Competitors were aged 8-18 from as many as 17 different states.
It was something of a guinea pig experiment for wrestling’s national governing body.
In May, USA Wrestling released its "Return To Mat Guidelines" and "Return To Events Guidelines" to instruct clubs, coaches and wrestlers on how to safely resume activity during the pandemic.
“We feel like wrestling is way ahead on this. We’ve been dealing with things like this for a number of years, with skin infections," said Pete Isaias, USA Wrestling’s director of national events. "We’ve already got protocols in place, from symptom checking to weigh-ins and all that, that’ll help mitigate this virus so we can have success.”
The Western States Championships went off without a hitch, thanks in part to the guidelines and communication with local public health authorities. No transmissions or cases of COVID-19 were reported.
“There’s nothing magical or specific about this that isn’t occurring at other venues around the country,” Koch said. “It’s temperature checks, it’s physical distancing, it’s mask-wearing, it’s hygiene, all of those things."
Those results inspired confidence for this weekend — even after Iowa City experienced a rapid rise in cases once University of Iowa students returned to campus.
'We have to find a way to live with this'
In early September, Iowa City topped the nation’s COVID-19 hotspot list. It was so rampant that the Iowa City community school district had to transition to fully virtual learning and Iowa athletics paused workouts.
In the month since, Johnson County’s positivity rate has dropped considerably, to 142 positive cases over the last week. It was the first county in Iowa to require residents to wear masks/face coverings in public. Koch said there was never a time when his office was worried about potentially calling off this weekend’s tournament.
“I don’t know if we ever got to the point where we were even 50-50,” he said. “We were watching the numbers every day, obviously. We were ready to have a serious conversation had those numbers kept climbing.
“The spike was very concentrated with university students, and this event is not going to be interacting, necessarily, with that community.”
Part of that, Schamberger added, will be the bubble-like nature of the event this weekend. Athletes and coaches are staying in hotels that are near the arena.
“We’ve put all the plans we can in place and we feel good that it’s going to be a pretty safe environment,” Schamberger said. “I know there’s a segment of the population that thinks there shouldn’t be anything happening, whatsoever, but we have to find a way to live with this new challenge and be able to operate safely within this new challenge.”
Cody Goodwin covers wrestling and high school sports for the Des Moines Register. Follow him on Twitter at @codygoodwin.