Danny Mullan doesn’t have to work very hard to explain the allure of the sporting event he organized earlier this summer in New Jersey. It can be summed up in about five words. Guys wrestling on the beach.  If there’s any confusion, just add the word shirtless.  “High school girls love cut and in-shape high school guys,” says Mr. Mullan, a board member of USA Wrestling’s New Jersey chapter who organized the New Jersey State Beach Championships at Asbury Park in July. There, wrestlers tripped, flipped and grappled one another on the sand as DJs played jock anthems and young women in bikinis looked on. “It’s a great atmosphere,” Mr. Mullan said. “It’s the old gladiator type of wrestling.”  Across the country—and as far away as Albania—advocates for this ancient Olympic sport are looking for new ways to drag it out of a slump. While overall participation in high schools in the U.S. is stable, many U.S. colleges have eliminated their wrestling programs—often to add more women’s sports.  In the meantime, many wrestlers all over the world have gravitated to more glamorous (and more lucrative) forms of athletic combat, like mixed martial arts, which combine elements of boxing, judo, kickboxing and wrestling, and where wrestlers have proven to be some of the best competitors.  To win them back, wrestling officials have embraced the beach version of the sport. FILA, the international wrestling authority, made beach wrestling an international sport shortly after the 2004 Olympics. This year’s FILA Beach World Championships will happen in Obzor, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea Coast Aug. 28-30. Previous world championships were held in Turkey and Albania.  Beach wrestling is less technical than the Olympic and collegiate styles. The rules are simple: The first wrestler to get three points wins. If you throw an opponent out of the ring or take him down, you get a point. And all the moves must be made on sand, which places an emphasis on brute strength rather than quickness and technique. “A lot more brawn comes into play just because of the logistics of it,” said Mr. Mullan.  At the New Jersey event, which was open to of all ages, 160 wrestlers paid a $25 entrance fee to participate. The wrestlers were separated by their weight classes and experience levels and allowed to wrestle three matches for a chance to win the trophy. Instead of wearing singlets—the tight and somewhat dorky traditional uniform of the sport—the participants were allowed to wear baggy board shorts.  Tim Vanderveer, a 24-year-old from Berkeley Heights, N.J., called the nervous jitters “awesome!” after he won the 180-pound division in the open category. Mr. Vanderveer, a billing analyst at AIG Inc., said this was his first competitive wrestling event since graduating from high school. “I had something unfulfilled,” he said, with sweat and sand stuck to his face. “I had something in the basement, something I wanted to do.”  That same day, in the youth division, Donovan “Donnie” Cataldi, 7, and Thomas O’Keefe, 8, circled each other warily on the sand as parents, friends and passers-by along the boardwalk cheered and yelled commands. A crowd of 500 or so watched and hundreds more stopped along the boardwalk to gawk.  At one point, both of them had so much grit on their faces that the referee blew the whistle and said: “Go to the bucket.” The two boys ran to a large, blue pail and dunked their heads in the water. “These studs are gettin’ clean,” said Brian Miller, Donnie’s coach, as he helped slap water on their faces to get the sand out of their eyes.  Wrestling remains healthy in U.S. high schools, growing steadily with 264,527 wrestlers in 11,377 high schools in 2007-2008, up from 262,294 wrestlers and 10,672 high-school programs in 2006-2007, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations in Indianapolis. Still, the levels are far below those of marquee sports, such as football, with 1.1 milion high school players in 13,987 high schools. Wrestling really tumbles at the college level, however, where the number of programs has slid from 363 in 1981-82 to 227 now, according to the NCAA, largely because of budget cuts in athletic departments related to Title IX. At the same time, the number of college football teams has grown to 629.  Dan Gable, the Olympic gold medalist and former University of Iowa wrestling coach, says beach wrestling could be “an attraction to help draw a little more interest to our sport.” But he said the main focus of wrestling in the U.S. should stay on freestyle and Greco-Roman styles, the two Olympic forms. The U.S. has done well internationally in these events in the past but has seen fewer medals lately, he said.  Advocates of beach wrestling say it’s a long shot, but there could someday be an attempt to make this an Olympic sport. In the meantime, more events like the one at Asbury Park are likely to happen around the country.  Whether or not it can make the sport more appealing to a mass audience remains to be seen. “I’ve never seen this before,” said Liz Urcinas, a spectator at the Asbury Park event. “Wrestling’s a bit of a weird sport.”  Write to Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com
Wrestling has moved from dank high-school gymnasiums to the beach. Beyond injecting sex appeal into the traditional sport, the hope is to recruit the next generation of athletes and attract larger audiences.