Women’s wrestling is continuing to make milestone moves at Colorado Mesa University.
It all started back in March with the announcement of a women’s wrestling team coming to CMU. Most recently, it has been the hiring of the inaugural head coach Travis Mercado.
Originally from Los Angeles, California, Mercado has been around wrestling since he was young.
After getting his Masters in California, he moved around being an assistant coach for numerous women’s wrestling teams. Most recently he was the associate head coach at King University. There he coached the Tornado to three first-place honors in the Women’s Collegiate Wrestling Association (WCWA) National Tournament.
Mercado then found himself at CMU after being chosen as the new coach out of the hundreds of applicants for the position.
“I saw the job opening here and it really met everything I was looking for,” Mercado said. “I wasn’t really looking for a job, but I was always keeping my options open and I wanted to be a head coach of my own.”
Mercado brings a passionate drive to CMU which appears to be a perfect fit for a brand new program. The first girl he ever coached, did change his philosophy on coaching women’s wrestling. He always had an open mind but figured out that he wanted to coach the athlete, not the gender.
“If I were to coach the guys right now I would do the same thing,” Mercado said.
Once on campus Mercado explained how he fell in love with CMU and the support he saw the athletics and the academics received at the university.
“They took me to the top of Dominguez [Hall], the patio up there and I was sold,” Mercado said.
The philosophies that CMU has for student-athletes is what truly made Mercado take this position. High standards of grades, sportsmanship class.
“The expectations of team GPA 3.5, the expectation is that we are winning national championships, helping girls make the junior national team, world team and the Olympic team,” Mercado said. “When I could see that they were on board with that, supportive of that, it was a no-brainer. The facilities and resources we have we can be very successful here and I think we can be very successful very quickly.”
Mercado had to begin recruiting right away. Since it was already May, recruiting was difficult because a lot of high school students already have their plans made. 13 athletes have committed to the team, even though the goal was to have 15 athletes by the start of the school year.
“Our big kind of slogan is “Set the Tone”, we are setting the tone for the future athlete, future team.
Four of the committed athletes are current CMU students, the other nine will be incoming students. They range from brand new wrestlers, with unique athletic experiences, to All-American and state champions
Since this is the first school in Colorado to offer Women’s Wrestling for college, they are currently working on emerging sports status in the NCAA. There are currently 21 schools that will offer women’s wrestling in the 2019-20 season and the proposal only needed 20.
There are 20 some NAIA schools that competed under the WCWA and CMU will compete with these teams. The closest school is in Texas and the furthest is in New York, therefore the team will be traveling.
“We will be traveling to Missouri, Northern California twice, Oklahoma, Kansas; so we will travel quite a bit,” Mercado said. “I’m having a hard time finding people to come to us. We are central to a lot of schools, but still 12 plus hours away. It’s a hard sell to have someone to come out for one match. I want to have some home matches for us so everyone on campus can see what women wrestling is.”
Traveling will be a struggle for the Mavericks when they do compete against other schools. There may not be many home meets in which it may be a while before many meets are held in Brownson Arena.
Still, no other RMAC teams have been added and CMU remains the only university in Colorado to have a women’s wrestling program.
In the future this will continue to bring more athletes to CMU due to the fact other programs are in states 12 hours away. This inaugural season will simply set an example to women’s wrestlers that CMU is a place to call home.
CMU will act as a central station for women’s wrestling in the Rocky Mountains.
Training has already started for the team and the official season will officially start in October and run through February. An official schedule is yet to be released.
