AWW To Produce Women’s College Multi-Divisional Rankings

Background is McKendree’s Andrea Sennett at the 2019 MoVal Open.

by Derek Levendusky, AWW staff writer

ROCHESTER, NY - As the landscape of women’s college wrestling changes, so will our rankings. Moving forward, we’ll be developing “Women’s College Multi-Divisional Rankings” which will feature a ranking of all college programs.

The NCAA and NAIA are now hosting their own national invitationals, and with that, many teams are opting out of the WCWA. Only 26 college programs are members in the WCWA this year out of the 63 current active college programs. That’s only 41% participation. On top of that, only three of our current top five teams in the NAIA are participating, while only two of our top five NCAA teams are members. So across the board, only 50% of the top 10 teams are registered with the WCWA this year. Neither of our current #1 teams are members—Menlo in NAIA & McKendree in the NCAA.

While we celebrate the WCWA history and the opportunities it still provides for the women, we don’t want to invest our resources into another partial ranking for women’s college wrestling. For obvious reasons, the NAIA rankings & the NCAA rankings are already a portion of college programs, so we’d like to avoid a third ranking—of some of the same programs—that is still only a partial representation of women’s college wrestling. We’ll be doing the first Women’s College Multi-Divisional Rankings this month. This will replace our WCWA Rankings. Our previous WCWA Rankings have already been changed to reflect this vocabulary.

The future of women’s college wrestling will look more and more like the men’s multi-divisional world. This is good and worth embracing with a celebratory attitude. We’ll continue to develop rankings for each division like we currently do for the NCAA and NAIA, while maintaining a college-wide view through our multi-divisional poll. At the same time, we will post links to the WCWA Rankings whenever they are produced by the WCWA.