Kansas USA Wrestling

Barton Community College will add wrestling to its list of sports in 2015-2016, a decision made official at Thursday’s Board of Trustees meeting.

As discussed at the Oct. 9 board study session, the addition of a wrestling program has the potential of increasing on-campus enrollment by 30-40 students. A number of Kansas community colleges already have wrestling programs and a couple of others are considering the addition of the sport. Trustee Don Learned said he’s lost count of the number of phone calls he’s received about this topic.

“People say it’s a great idea,” Learned said. “I think the community is really behind this.”

Trustee Mike Minton added, “I think it’s a great idea.” He asked Barton President Dr. Carl Heilman for assurances that other sports programs won’t see their budgets reduced to make room for wrestling.

“We want quality teams,” he said. “We can’t take away from other programs.” Heilman reminded trustees that startup costs were included in this year’s budget. After the initial expenses, the program's revenues are expected to exceed its costs around Year 2. “We did not reduced the operations of other athletic programs in putting this forward.”