He killed himself training for the sport he loved.
After an hour-long practice on Dec. 9, 1997, Jefferey Reese stayed behind while the rest of the Michigan wrestlers left the gym to eat dinner. The 21-year-old kinesiology major, who aspired to become a teacher and high school wrestling coach, couldn’t wait to wrestle rival Michigan State the following day.
He desperately wanted to make the 150-pound weight class and had lost 11 pounds in the previous three days. He needed to lose six more in the next three hours.
He peddled on an exercise bike in a 92-degree training room. Beneath his sweatshirt he wore a plastic suit to help him sweat. He took breaks from the bike to sit in a sauna.
After the two-hour workout, Reese was walking to the scale to find out if he had reached his goal when he collapsed. By the time paramedics arrived, he was dead.
It was later determined Reese died of kidney and heart failure caused by excessive exercising and dehydration.
Before 1997, no collegiate wrestler had ever died training to make weight. Reese’s death was the third in 33 days.
The tragedies prompted drastic NCAA rule changes. In April 1998, plastic suits, saunas and steam rooms were banned, a weight certification program was established and, most importantly, weigh-ins were moved from 24 hours before match time to one hour.
Six years later, the culture of cutting weight is safer and promotes a healthier lifestyle. But those closest to the sport still grapple with the NCAA’s decisions and continue to search for improvements.
A culture of cutting weight
Cutting weight has been a part of wrestling since the sport’s introduction into college athletics in 1928, but never before had it threatened to destroy the sport itself.
Wrestlers strive to move down a weight class — never up — because they think they will have an advantage over smaller opponents. To lose weight, they constantly work for a thick, continuous sweat, because water weight is easiest to shed.
The practice had gone on for nearly 70 years without a single casualty. But gradual technological advancements and an NCAA rule change after the 1995-96 season altered everything.
In April 1996, the NCAA increased the time allowed between weigh-ins and matches from five hours to as much as a full day.
Coaches critical of the decision said the change encouraged wrestlers to lose more weight by giving them more recovery time.
And some suspected dietary supplements were involved, although investigations never determined that they were used.
A year and a half after the changes, Billy Saylor died at Campbell University in North Carolina trying to lose 15 pounds in 12 hours. Eighteen days later, Joseph LaRosa died at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse trying to lose 12 pounds in four days. Fifteen days later, Reese died.
Michigan coach Joe McFarland, who was an assistant in 1997, stayed with Reese after practice the night he died.
“It’s very unfortunate, but good changes came about after the three tragedies that might not have occurred otherwise,” McFarland said. “What Reese did was not uncommon — he just went too far. It was a culture. Everyone did it without ever really thinking about it.”
evolution of cutting weight
Sitting on the couch in his spacious office at the south end of Ryan Field, Ken Kraft smiles as he remembers the thick steak and mound of mash potatoes he used to eat after weigh-ins.
Kraft, Northwestern’s assistant athletic director, wrestled at NU in the 1950s and coached for the next 22 years. Over the past 50 years, he has witnessed how weight-cutting has evolved.
During Kraft’s tenure as head coach from 1957-1979, NU had only one athletic trainer for eight varsity teams, and no one had ever even heard of a nutritionist.
The first weight-cutting device Kraft saw was the “hot box” in Patten Gym in the late 1960s. Smaller than a bathroom stall, the inside of the 4.5-by-5-by-3-foot box was covered with 60-watt light bulbs. One NU wrestler developed a theory of exactly how many beads of sweat had to drip from his face to lose a pound.
“One of the wrestlers was tired of sitting in the box, so he broke it,” Kraft said. “And we never bothered to replace it.”
Kraft’s first experience with plastic suits came when his brother trained in an old, yellow fishing slicker in the early ’60s. Plastic suits started appearing in wrestling rooms a few years later.
Kraft also remembers when a wrestler — who later became a pediatrician — distributed laxatives to his teammates to help them lose weight.
“Kids continued to find ways to lose weight quicker, and we started becoming too smart for ourselves,” Kraft said. “But the biggest difference was when the weigh-ins were moved from five hours before the meet to 24 hours.”
a change for the worse
When Kraft retired from coaching in 1979, Dan Gable was in his second season as Iowa’s head coach. Gable, an Olympic gold medalist and three-time All-American, coached Iowa to 21 straight Big Ten titles and 15 NCAA championships.
Gable retired from coaching a year before the deaths but was a member of the wrestling rules committee when the NCAA Competitive Safeguard Committee changed the weigh-in time.
“The NCAA crammed rules down our throat,” Gable said. “From the beginning they would not cooperate with us.”
The rule stipulated that weigh-ins could be held any time within 24 hours of the match. But it was quickly assumed that all weigh-ins would be held a full day before competitions.
The competitive safeguard committee, which has power over the rules committee, made the changes to try to help the sport. They thought moving back the weigh-in would give wrestlers more recovery time so they would be fresher for matches, NCAA spokesman Ty Halpin said.
But coaches said the extra time encouraged wrestlers to drop even more weight since they knew they could cram in a few hearty meals and a good night’s rest before the match.
“The NCAA Competitive Safeguard Committee changed the rules, and they’re the ones who are really responsible for the deaths,” Minnesota coach J. Robinson said. “The committee does not know anything about the sport.
“They put all these rules on wrestling, which has had three deaths in 100 years, but they don’t put rules on football, which has deaths every year.”
Thirty-three days after Reese’s death, the NCAA made a midseason rule change and shifted the weigh-in time to a maximum of two hours before the meet.
Then, following the end of the 1997-98 season, a weight-certification process was established, weight-cutting tools were banned and weigh-ins were moved to an hour before the match.
a new generation
Jason Erwinski arrived at NU in September 1998. The 5-foot-8 wrestler from Tinley Park, Ill., won a high school state championship his senior season — the season Reese, LaRosa and Saylor died.
Erwinski didn’t know much about the three deaths when he came to Evanston, but he immediately learned of the impact they had on collegiate wrestling.
“I didn’t know some of the things the older guys did,” Erwinski said. “It came as a shock to me some of the things I heard they used to do. You can’t cut anywhere near the amount of weight they used to cut.”
This season Erwinski has moved from the 174-pound class to the 165-pound class, and the methods he’s used to shed the weight reveal how a new generation of wrestlers is slimming down.
To make weight for the start of the season in November, Erwinski wrestled and ran during the summer trying to stay within 10 pounds of his weight class.
“With the changes, the wrestlers have to keep in good shape all year long,” Iowa coach Jim Zalesky said. “I constantly stay on the kids and make sure they don’t procrastinate about losing weight, but do it gradually.”
Once school started, Erwinski began opting for water over Pepsi and chicken breasts and pasta instead of McDonald’s triple-cheese burge
rs.
“With the new rules, it’s really forced wrestlers to have better eating habits and created a lifestyle — a good lifestyle,” said NU coach Tim Cysewski, who never eats dinner after 7 p.m. “When I started wrestling, I asked my mom how to lose weight. But if she knew how to lose weight, she would have done it herself.”
Erwinski has the help of certified athletic trainers who measure his weight, hydration and body composition once a year as part of the new weight-certification process.
The NCAA-mandated assessment determined that the lowest weight Erwinski could wrestle at was 163 pounds — where his body fat would be at five percent, the minimum allowable level.
Another part of the process prohibits a wrestler from losing more than 1.5 percent of his body weight each week — about 2.5 pounds a week for Erwinski.
Every morning Erwinski wakes up at 7:30 and runs for 20 minutes at the stadium before his 9 a.m. class to speed up his metabolism.
During two-hour practices, non-stop wrestling, sprints, somersaults and one-handed cartwheels allow Erwinski to lose a couple of pounds without having to use plastic suits or saunas. If an athlete is caught using banned methods, he has to miss the next contest. A second offense results in a season suspension.
“Eliminating the tools that allow extreme weight-cutting really extend dehydration safety,” said Matt Doyle, a certified athletic trainer at Iowa. “The NCAA rules have really prevented the extreme amount of weight loss that used to occur. The rules have definitely made the sport safer.”
the pendulum swings back?
Cysewski hustles out of his office and down the stairs to the wrestling room. The strong, wiry coach shouts, “Five minutes until practice!”and ducks into the coaches’ room to change into his sweats.
With 22 years at the helm of NU’s wrestling team, the 49-year-old Cysewski is part of the older generation of coaches who don’t want a return to past practices of weight-cutting, but who think the rules need more flexibility.
“After the deaths, the pendulum had to swing hard from one extreme to another,” said Cysewski, one of seven members of the NCAA Division I Wrestling Rules Committee Gable used to to work on. “A lot of good guidelines have been created, but they should not be set in stone.”
As an All-American wrestler at Iowa in the mid-1970s, Cysewski enjoyed a pre-match meal and relied on a specific warm-up routine that started a couple of hours before the match.
But under the current rules, wrestlers can’t eat such a meal and have only an hour to prepare after the weigh-in for the match.
Illinois coach Mark Johnson is one of several coaches who think the weigh-ins should be pushed back a couple hours so wrestlers can drink water and enjoy a pre-match meal.
Wrestlers today also don’t have the post-match options that Johnson and Cysewski did when they wrestled in the 1970s. Both used to sit in a sauna for muscle relaxation and recovery.
Cysewski, Johnson and Gable are among the many proponents for allowing saunas back into the sport for non-weight-cutting purposes.
“Eighty-year-old men can sit in a sauna at a health club, but fine-tuned athletes cannot,” Cysewski said. “It is worrying because we don’t want to drive kids underground to use saunas at places where we cannot monitor them at all.”
The NCAA understands the coaches’ concerns, but it’s weary of sending the pendulum all the way back to where it was in 1997, Halpin said.
The coaches want to continue to monitor the wrestlers closely, but they feel some of the guidelines are unnecessary. Coaches can’t help but laugh at the urine-specific gravity hydration tests that trainers described as complex and inaccurate.
“You have to completely bloat yourself,” said Zalesky, the Hawkeyes coach. “You never drink that much because you could not wrestle.”
a healthy lifestyle
In five years wrestling has altered 50 years of weight-cutting culture. More information is being made available to wrestlers, and the NCAA continues to study weight loss.
Mike Moyer, executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association, chaired the NCAA wrestling rules committee at the time of the deaths in 1997 and is one of the architects behind the changes.
“The wrestling community recognized there were problems,” Moyer said. “The three deaths accelerated the changes.”
According to Moyer, NCAA research has shown that the change in weigh-in times and weight-certification process have helped reduce rapid weight loss.
At the 1992 NCAA Championships, when players were allowed 24 hours to recover, the average wrestler regained eight pounds after the weigh-in time by the following day. Eight pounds is the difference between two weight classes.
In 1998, the weigh-in time was reduced to two hours and the average weight regain was six pounds. In 1999, when the weigh-in time remained two hours and the weight-certification process was introduced, the average weight loss dropped to 1.5 pounds.
“The research demonstrates the policies in place have been positive for our sport,” Moyer said. “But there is no finish line, it’s a journey, and we need to continue to look for improvements.”
Gable, a U.S. Wrestling Hall of Famer, urged the NCAA Competitive Safeguard Committee and wrestling community to work together to continue to make rules safer and more practical.
But Gable believes rules alone could never stop a wrestler from pushing himself too far.
Education is the only answer.
“We need to focus on education and not creating hard-pressed rules,” Gable said. “Everyday I research nutrition, recovery and improved conditions for weight loss.
“I believe our sport can become more of a model about how to develop a healthy lifestyle.”
