earney walks back over to the bench and places a hand on the shoulder of one senior wrestler perched at the end. The wrestler does not look up. Kearney crouches down and places his other hand to arena’s hardwood floor. “Let them do it,” he says to himself. “It’s in their hands now.” He has been head coach for little more than a year, and this has been the most difficult thing to get used to. Now, in the final meet of the season, the Ducks are wrestling before their largest home crowd. Everyone understands the importance of tonight’s meet. This isn’t just Oregon’s last chance this year to beat Oregon State. This is a chance for the 34-year-old coach to prove to the university that the sport of wrestling is worth keeping.

These are hard times not only for Chuck Kearney, but for his entire sport. While the number of high school competitors has greatly increased during the last 20 years, the number of wrestlers at the college level has severely dropped off. Since 1972, more than 250 wrestling programs have fallen from the college ranks.

The decline of college wrestling is three-fold. Schools are looking for ways to even the scholarship count between men’s and women’s sports because, in 1972, Congress enacted Title IX, which made it illegal for federally funded schools to discriminate on the basis of gender. Another reason for wrestling’s fade is simply a lack of interest by the general public. While college wrestling still flourishes in places such as Iowa, Oklahoma and Nebraska, the average tournament outside the Midwest brings in only a few hundred hard-core fans. And student fans are even rarer still.

“Wrestling is in trouble now,” says Jim Giunta, the Director of the National Collegiate Wrestling Association. “To be honest, the difference between the excitement of a wrestling match compared to the excitement of a basketball game—it just doesn’t compare. There’s more hoopla, there’s more excitement, there’s more tense moments [in basketball].”

ut the third reason—the one that has recently been the most devastating—is that the few wrestling stories which have made national headlines have been extremely troubling. In the last months of 1997, three young wrestlers from three college programs died with within weeks of each other while trying to cut weight for competition. Until the deaths, weigh-ins were held at least one day before each match, allowing wrestlers to cut large amounts of weight in short periods of time, knowing that they had a day to recuperate and regain their strength before the match. But 1997’s tragedies changed all of that.

Jack Saylor, 19, of North Carolina’s Campbell University, lost 32 pounds between August 27 and November 7, but still needed to shed another six pounds before he was eligible to compete in the 195-pound weight class. Saylor lost the weight the way many wrestlers did prior to the NCAA’s rule changes: He tried to sweat out the remaining pounds by wearing a suit of plastic sweats under heavy cotton clothing during his regular workout routine. The wrestler died of a heart attack shortly after his workout.

Two weeks later, Joseph LaRosa, a 22-year-old wrestler from the University of Wisconsin, died while trying to drop four pounds in just four hours. Later that same month at the University of Michigan, Jeff Reese, 21, died while trying to cut more than six pounds in just three hours. The pattern was the same in each case: Forced to drop large amounts of weight to qualify for competition, all three wrestlers succumbed to cardiac arrest after several hours of super concentrated activity. The doctors’ findings were unable to determine a more specific cause of death.