After college, the American wrestling community becomes a bit more disorganized when it comes to teams, which is to be expected in an individual sport. But with the emergence of Regional Training Centers in the last decade, the formerly inchoate environment is rapidly coalescing into something more concrete, so we took a stab at measuring the performance of those RTCs and wrestling clubs at the U.S. Open. 

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This study comes with a mountain of caveats. For instance, there is a lot of overlap among membership, sponsorship, and affiliation. Individual wrestlers can and are sponsored by multiple clubs, organizations, and/or training centers. We tried to simplify the process by going with the college-based RTCs and clubs whenever there were multiple attachments. This process very much short-changed Titan Mercury, who easily sponsors the most active competitors in the country. But almost all the TMWC senior men's freestylers are also part of an RTC or wrestling club where it's assumed they do the majority of their training. 

So a special shout out to Titan Mercury for being the actual U.S. Open Club champions, a physical award they received in Vegas from USA Wrestling. Here though, we tried to see which gym was producing the best results at the Open. TMWC and every sponsor is all a big part of the success of those gyms, we just don't have a good way of measuring that (at the moment). 

There were other difficulties in isolating the training club from the sponsorship. For example, we treated Arizona-based athletes as part of the Sunkist Kids WC, but we treated Sunkist Kids sponsored athletes who trained in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as Nebraska WTC and Tar Heel WC members, respectively. 

Which is why you should consider the numbers we generated and the corresponding rankings as far from perfect. The numbers, by the way, are NCAA-style placement points, but no bonus or advancement points. Since the U.S. Open places to eight, like the NCAAs, we figured it was the most applicable scoring system, although UWW uses a different system that places the top 10. 

In any event, we went through the results line by line, which took up quite a bit of time, and we did our best, but if you think we messed something up, by all means, drop us a line and let us know!

Below are the team points scored by the senior men's freestylers (SR MFS), senior women's freestylers (SR WFS), senior Greco-Roman wrestlers, (SR GR), junior men's freestylers (JR GR), and junior Greco guys (JR GR), sorted by most SR MFS points then most total points. A zero means the club has athletes entered in that division but scored no points. A blank cell means there were no wrestlers entered. 

Results

Tremendous performance by the Minnesota Storm, which has a placer in all five divisions. The Wolfpack RTC may have been thinking about that home-mat advantage they'd have at the World Team Trials Challenge Tournament in Raleigh. And a surprisingly good performance was had by the NJ RTC, a club that has only been up and running for a little over a year or so. 

Below is a table of the total participants per gym/club/organization. Please keep in mind that is after reducing the total affiliations per competitor to one, and so the numbers may not correspond with what the clubs themselves would submit.

The full list of clubs is longer, below are just those with 10 or more competitors. 

Participants

And of course, what list of numbers and locations would be complete without a heat map, the famous map that we all know and love. Below is the location of senior men's freestyle clubs in a heat map based on points scored at the U.S. Open by placement. 

Heat Map