Wrestlestat now Premium?

[MPhillips]

6 minutes ago, fishbane said:

I don't understand the reference.  Wrestlestat predates this board.

Maybe the, "old" InterMat, but certainly not this one.

[LJB]

55 minutes ago, MPhillips said:

Maybe the, "old" InterMat, but certainly not this one.

remember when just saying "bbs" got the children all riled up?

[MoveCountermove]

20 hours ago, maligned said:

highly intuitive ranking next to each name

[MoveCountermove]

18 hours ago, BruceyB said:

I think this whole thing likely hurts WS in the long run. Before, WS was the default place to go for individual match results. Other website didn't have much of an incentive to try to carve into that space because everyone already used WS. Now, WS by putting up their paywall has created a need within the community for a new place to provide the results for free. I didn't even know matsavant had a website until this week. I thought it was just an X/Instagram account. 

WS's UI as you mentioned also looked like it was from 1995. It was simple enough and it worked, but if another website offers essentially the same information with a more modern and friendly UI, wrestlestat has essentially pushed us directly into a competitor's arms. 

FWIW, other than video, what content is truly worth the money for the average fan? I'm not paying money for rankings, recaps, or articles in 2026.

Tend to agree here a bit. The yearly subscription is fine at $40, I guess, but $10/month is a bit steep for statistics many of us won’t even need to use, but like to. I won’t pay it cuz the site was more of a thing I went to for reference than something I utilized regularly for anything of substance. It would take me longer to get the info without WS, but it can be found just the same. And now matsavant has come into my life and I’m back to where I was essentially. Hope it doesn’t result in issues for their site, but I have to agree that I think many people who trafficked there are going to stop vs. paying the cost

[fishbane]

18 hours ago, MPhillips said:

Maybe the, "old" InterMat, but certainly not this one.

The original Intermat was run by the NWCA and it was great.  That was the go to place for wrestling box scores as I think all the weight management was run through them and schools had to report the results there along with weights form weigh-ins. At some point Rev Wrestling bought Intermat.  Results reporting persisted here and on the regular NWCA website too for a time.  It must have stopped whenever weight management and results reporting switched to trackwrestling from the NWCA tracker.

It's surprising the wrestler profiles on Flo are so bad in comparison to wrestlestat when Flo owns Track which is where all the results are aggregated.  From watching FRL it seems like the hosts used wrestlestat to look up wrestlers results more than either of their own websites (Flo and Track).  You would think that would create some motivation to improve it.

[ionel]

6 minutes ago, fishbane said:

You would think that would create some motivation to improve it.

... except that you are are talking about Flo so ... 

[MoveCountermove]

57 minutes ago, ionel said:

... except that you are are talking about Flo so ... 

literally what I was about to add

[1032004]

On 10/4/2026 at 11:55 PM, RAFWiki said:

This is great

Is there anything like this for Freestyle?

Didn’t @Jon_Kozak have one, and IIRC it helped him get the job at Flo?  I don’t think it’s still active though 

[fishbane]

On 10/4/2026 at 11:55 PM, RAFWiki said:

This is great

Is there anything like this for Freestyle?

You can find historical freestyle results here https://uww.org/athletes-results?tab=historical-results.  It only has international events.

This website has profiles with freestyle wrestling results for some American wrestlers.  It isn't comprehensive, but includes domestic results you can't find at the other one. 

https://wrestlingrecords.com/

[Idaho]

23 hours ago, fishbane said:

Such player profiles should be readily available on any site that covers the sport.  When you go to Intermat rankings the wrestlers names should be links that go to a profile for the player with results.  Same thing on Flo and other wrestling sites.  If the stats become available then they all must provide it because they want to keep users on the site. 

So are you going to volunteer to input all the information here on Intermat for free?  Seems like they are doing a good job of keeping you on this site without doing that. Comparing MLB and ESPN to college wrestling is funny. Everyone knows the discrepancy in resources that allow professional sports to do that. Yeah, when wrestlestat was first getting going,  they posted on the old board,  and many of us, myself included, argued and complained a lot about the rankings and algorithm. The great thing is that you don't have to use wrestlestat...use mat savant, team sites, or whatever you want. Like you said, you can get the scores of dual matches in lots of places. If you get in a situation where you need historical data or something WS provides, hit me up. I only charge $1 per screenshot....

[RAFWiki]

55 minutes ago, fishbane said:

You can find historical freestyle results here https://uww.org/athletes-results?tab=historical-results.  It only has international events.

Nothing says "user friendly" like me having to go into the source code of UWW's web pages to retrieve birthdates and direct links to wrestler profiles

[Jon_Kozak]

2 hours ago, 1032004 said:

Didn’t @Jon_Kozak have one, and IIRC it helped him get the job at Flo?  I don’t think it’s still active though 

Yes I had one that had essentially all the results from 2018-2021. I recently made another one that has results from 2018-present (has a total of over 55,000 results). Hoping to get it on Flo soon...just using it internally for now. More goes into it than just pushing it live, so not sure how long it will take, but I'm optimistic! 

[Jason Bryant]

21 hours ago, fishbane said:

The original Intermat was run by the NWCA and it was great.  That was the go to place for wrestling box scores as I think all the weight management was run through them and schools had to report the results there along with weights form weigh-ins. At some point Rev Wrestling bought Intermat.  Results reporting persisted here and on the regular NWCA website too for a time.  It must have stopped whenever weight management and results reporting switched to trackwrestling from the NWCA tracker.

It's surprising the wrestler profiles on Flo are so bad in comparison to wrestlestat when Flo owns Track which is where all the results are aggregated.  From watching FRL it seems like the hosts used wrestlestat to look up wrestlers results more than either of their own websites (Flo and Track).  You would think that would create some motivation to improve it.

Close. 

The original InterMat was started by Tom Owens in 1995. He created databases that tied wrestler IDs to their names and had an entry/import database that was a bit convoluted to someone who didn't build it. In the early days, he put everything behind the paywall, since college sports sites weren't super prevalent at the time and Sports Information offices were still faxing and rarely e-mailing them out. There was a lot of manual entry in the early years. Tom also had a pretty robust webstore, which sold gear. Tom also used that database for The Predicament, giving the Iowa site the same kind of infrastructure. Tom sold the site to the NWCA, with Brute as co-owner, in 2004. He stayed on for a year and then stepped away. The NWCA hired me in the summer of 2005 and I took over operation of the site under the NWCA from 2005-2008. 

After the prevalence of those school sites, Tom didn't have the dual results fully paywalled after that, making dual scores free and basic tournament results free, usually linking to brackets he'd scanned or PDFs that were attached. The deep dive profiles and feature articles and recruiting rankings were the only things paywalled. 

After the three wrestlers died in 1997, the NCAA made sweeping rule changes and the NWCA developed and patented the weight management program. One of the byproducts of that was the recording of results along with the weigh-in data. On NWCAonline, there was a separate database system called the NWCA scorebook. By this time, Tom's original database was starting to lose its relevance for full season results, since the scorebook was supposed to have them. Merging the databases was a bit wonky, but the dual meet entry portion was still part of the InterMat site even after I left for Wrestling 411 after the 2008 season. 

This is where we get into the crossover discussion. One of my nightly tasks was entering the dual meet results - manually - through the old database since the coaches and SIDs were often 2-5 days behind logging that stuff into the scorebook. To have it "timely" and to keep InterMat "in the lead" with results, I'd spend hours updating results from my apartment, my buddy's house, from the bar (if that bar had wifi). It even prompted my best friend to say "What bad D3 dual are you updating now," as I cracked open a Yuengling Lager at his coffee table. I also had a freelance budget where I'd pay people like the Pirate to help me enter results on those heavy weekends. I had 2-3 people that were assigned certain duals/leagues, so we could attack that data better. 

There was another website that would wait until I took all the results from my e-mail and from scouring websites nightly and just straight copy them, in order, every night. When I inquired about it, the response was "results aren't proprietary!" as if it was a defense for them just straight ripping off my hours of work. Sure, the results themselves aren't proprietary, but rather the display. So no matter what, the hard work you put in, sometimes as part of your job, sometimes on your own (like my old Virginia-based Mat Talk iteration) will be ripped off, copied, and often presented as "better." 

I've been using a lot of AI tools to help code operation systems, portals, and to tie in my long-running historical research and logging of results that have never shown up on the internet and some that have. I've had to institute various types of protections to try to make sure that doesn't get scraped and just ripped on to someone else's site. So from a perspective of someone that's put in countless paid and unpaid hours chronicling and displaying results and placement data for the sport the last 30 years, I can side with WS to where their work should be compensated and when almost the same data shows up on another side, nearly instantaneously, it's like "why are we cannibalizing ourselves?"

I used WrestleStat one year for my Preview Guide. It was good data, but it also didn't align fully with some things the qualification process needed. They've gotten so much better with their results over the years. Dan and Greg are great guys and work tirelessly because the sport needs it. They deserve and have earned our support and our consumer dollar. 

Sites like baseball-reference have paid staff. They have people that are paid for that work, which enables them to offer it, with their business model, free to a degree. Major college sports also have requirements for live stats, giving the NCAA a repository of live data that they sell that API to CBS, ESPN, Fox, all the sports sites. In college hockey, they also require live scoring, so sites like College Hockey Inc., USCHO, and CHN - sites similar in scope to what we have with Flo, InterMat, et al - pay for that API to display scores on their sites in near live time. Wrestling does not fully have that and the NCAA doesn't require it for wrestling, since their Genius/NCAA Live Stats software can't really get a good ROI on the R&D it would take for them to build that for wrestling and have enough paid schools to justify building it out. 

We have too many nuances - matches that don't count, team competitions, open competitions, invitational team-scored competitions. So many variables that aren't like team sports where it's "Team A vs. Team B" - go. 

I still hope for a day that we can have official results from an NCAA/NAIA/NJCAA sponsored repository, but until then, we'll have where it lives. I have my own results backend and historical backend. I don't market it. I put it places where I can quickly access it, but I also don't want the time I spent building those pages and formatting and organizing that data to be ripped off. I also pay the Pirate an annual 'license fee' to use the results he sends out and compiles on his own time, because that has value. So yes, I'm using someone else's compilation for things, but I'm also paying that person for the rights to use it. 

We don't have a sport that's flush with "money" in the business of wrestling, so when I say it kind of hurts to see people just bailing on WrestleStat because they simply want their time compensated, I say it from a position that I've been there before. When you're paid to do something, there's a degree of responsibility and ownership that comes with it. Someone who jumps in, does something cool for free, then fades away. A lot of sites have come and gone over the years, usually when people go to college, get married, have kids, get a new job that's not as flexible. 

I've thought about shuttering the Preview Guide because it gets constantly shared by one person who buys it and then gives it away to 40 other people since data is so readily available now, sending a 15MB file isn't painful anymore. If everyone who actually read the preview guide actually paid for it in the way they were supposed to, I know I'd have a lot more financial resources to make it better. Imagine how much better this sport could be if we did invest in the time people Dan and Greg at WrestleStat, rather than recoil in horror at someone wanting to be paid for the hours of time that thousands of people benefit from?

Yes, this is preachy. Yes, this is judgmental to a degree, since I've literally lived through this scenario several times. It's why its important as a sport that we support ourselves with the places who spend the money to do things. Ripping off streams and posting them for free takes money away from our sport. The number of people who will claim "more eyes will see it" if its free don't realize that gratitude doesn't pay the bills. 

I'll get off my soapbox now and tell everyone to get off my lawn. 

Yours in wrestling,

JB

 

[AdrianStewart]

To JB:   A:  don't quit the preview guide ... it's great reading material on the flight to NCAAs!

 

[Wrestleknownothing]

Hola Amigos. It's been a minute. I was told to come check out this thread. And man is it bonkers. Some of the takes on here are a little out there.

Comparing the NFL and MLB, two sports with insane resources (does the NFL or FIFA have THE greatest resources in the sporting world?) to college wrestling is one of the silliest things I have every seen. 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading @Jason Bryant's history of this site, its predecessors, and his ventures. As someone else who has spent a shit-ton of time typing data into a database, I understand his stance and feel his pain. And the amount of work I have done pales in comparison to his - and to what @cowcards has done with his WrestlingGuru site. I started doing this when my nephews got into wrestling. Now that they are done I often wonder why I still do it. 

I wholly support what WrestleStat is doing. As a matter of fact, I have wondered what has taken them so long. They provide so much value to this community and by not charging they run the risk that is now realized - their work would be taken for granted and people would develop a sense of entitlement to it. There are some on here in whom that sense is strong.

Yes, WrestleStat has competitors now with matsavant, making it a risky time to shift their business model. But a word of warning there. I have found a few errors in their historical data without even trying too hard. For many wrestlers, what the wrestler's school page says does not foot with what matsavant has. It makes me wonder what the source of their data is. There is no indication on the site about where they got their data. To spring up fully formed is a thing that makes you go hmmmm (if I squint I might convince myself that I see some of my DNA there). I look forward to them paywalling their data too.

The ads on WrestleStat can drive you to distraction, but if you can handle this site you can handle pretty much anything. Now, with the pay version the ads will disappear. Halle-freakin-lujah. Well, have a good night. I need to log out here, log into WrestleStat, drop 40 bucks, and get back to my scotch. As I learned in central Europe this summer - Na zdrowie, egészségedre, prost, and na zdraví.

[MNRodent]

I was a state editor/ranker for Tom Owens @intermatwrestle back in the mid to late 90s.  Those were the early days of internet technology.