Former Sunnyside High School wrestler Kyle DeBerry is searching for a new school after Arizona State eliminated the sport Tuesday.

james gregg / arizona daily star 2007

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For two days, many of the NCAA's 85 surviving wrestling programs have phoned Kyle and Bobby DeBerry with an invitation for Kyle to wrestle at their school.

Virginia Tech. Rutgers. Iowa State. And on and on.

"It's chaos," said Bobby, who has coached Sunnyside High School to 11 consecutive state championships. "We'll be fortunate because Kyle can almost hand-pick a new school, but most of the others don't have those options."

Rather than enjoy the final days of his freshman year at Arizona State, rather than prepare for next week's World Team Trials at the USA Olympic wrestling center in Colorado Springs, Kyle accompanied his father on an unexpected financial mission Thursday.

The four-time Sunnyside High School state wrestling champion and his father spent much of the day trying to avoid paying $6,500 to a Tempe apartment complex for a messy lease agreement.

"It's a cut-throat business," said Bobby. "I'm tempted to go to the Phoenix airport and hold up a sign that says 'apartment for lease.' Those apartment people don't care what Arizona State did to all those people."

It was his first attempt at humor in a humorless situation.

On Tuesday, the Sun Devils eliminated their men's tennis, swimming and wrestling programs. Kyle, a redshirt freshman with star potential, had recently signed an apartment lease through May 2009. Imagine that scenario multiplied many times by ex-Sun Devils now in athletic and academic limbo.

There was no warning. One day you're on scholarship, having been promised room and board through May 2009. The next day you're looking at a map wondering how life might be in Blacksburg, Va., or Ames, Iowa.

Unless you have DeBerry's athletic potential, the options aren't as nice.

Don't expect this to be an isolated story of college athletics shrinking to reflect the need to satisfy NCAA gender-equity issues. As the Jones vs. Jones battle to pump every available dollar into football and men's basketball escalates, men's non-revenue sports are sure to dwindle over the next decade. Some of them, such as wrestling, appear doomed.

Two of the great wrestlers in Tucson history, three-time state high school champion Shawn Charles of Santa Rita, and two-time Sunnyside state champ Thom Ortiz — a mainstay on ASU's 1988 NCAA championship team — can painfully relate.

Charles was the head coach at Fresno State when the Bulldogs eliminated wrestling in June 2005. He scrambled to find work as an assistant coach in the Ivy League, at Brown University. He is now an assistant coach at Missouri.

"A lot of people were stuck," said Charles. "It was June 15 and all the scholarship money had been handed out for the year. All of the coaching jobs had been filled."

He ultimately received a $110,000 settlement from Fresno State before moving across the country for about half the pay.

Ortiz, 40, said he hopes to raise in excess of $8 million to endow the ASU wrestling program and get a stay of execution.

But it won't happen. When Oregon eliminated its wrestling program a year ago, the UO wrestling community raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. The athletic administration said it didn't matter. Charles tried the same approach at FSU.

See ya.

The medical benefits for Ortiz and his 10-year-old daughter, Olivia, are to expire in November. Even for someone as skilled as Ortiz (three national Top-10 finishes in six seasons), the wrestling job market is tight, to say the least.

The Arizona Wildcats eliminated their wrestling program in the winter of 1981. Coach Bill Nelson, an Olympian who had been on the job for 18 years, was summoned to the athletic director's office and told that declining revenues from Fred Snowden's slumping basketball program had put the athletic department into a $200,000 hole.

Nelson didn't tiptoe through the media field. He called the UA athletic administration "inept" and said they were "fiscally irresponsible."

In the late 1990s, Nelson told me that wrestling was doomed at ASU and in the Pac-10, where Stanford and Oregon State are the lone survivors.

"We could've saved wrestling at Arizona," he said. "We got 9,100 signatures pledging help to save the sport. But the president (John Schaefer) told me we needed those 9,100 people to give us money, not ink."

He said cutting wrestling saved the UA a mere $50,000.

ASU is likely to realize about $400,000 in yearly "savings" by getting Kyle DeBerry to transfer to some place like Virginia Tech.

"I've talked to Thom Ortiz and he's distraught," said Bobby DeBerry. "So far he's keeping his chin up, because that's better than striking out and pointing the finger at people in the administration.

"I was a UA student when we dropped our wrestling program and, thankfully, it swung me into the direction of coaching. Out of those ashes, I found a new career path. I hope Thom can be as fortunate as I have been."