The Hidden Cost of Athlete Card Insurance. A Data-Driven Analysis of How USA Wrestling Card Requirements Create a 7.2% Drop in Registrations

Here at WrestlingIQ, we've always prioritized two things:

1. Make it possible for coaches to spend less time on admin work and more time on coaching.

2. Increase the number of wrestlers in the sport. 

We've had plenty of one-on-one conversations with club owners and coaches at all levels over the past seven years, and we have an increasingly large dataset to provide unique, actionable insights to accomplish those goals. What follows is an analysis of the effect of USA Wrestling card requirements on online registration completion rates in WrestlingIQ.

Based on a dataset of nearly 17,000 registrations, we found that requiring a USA Wrestling card increases cart abandonment rates by 7.2% when a USA Wrestling card is required compared to when it is not required. 

In other words, if 100 people attempt to sign up a wrestler for your team, ~7 of them left before completing registration and never stepped on the mat. If you run a two-season model—folkstyle + freestyle/greco—your team will be impacted by this twice a year, every single year. 

Methodology

To ensure a fair comparison, this analysis focused exclusively on "full season" registration type in WrestlingIQ. Full season registrations are what most seasonal wrestling teams use for their folkstyle and freestyle/greco registrations. We are explicitly excluding all other registration types WrestlingIQ handles, such as camps/clinics, recurring subscriptions, drop-ins, and trials for this analysis.

The dataset comprised 16,911 registrations across 131 teams. The analysis compared two scenarios:

1. Registrations where USA Wrestling card was required
2. Registrations where USA Wrestling card was not required

Note that we are using USA Wrestling because our data is the largest for that card type, but we believe this applies to any other athlete insurance card, such as AAU Wrestling or Nuway. The common theme across all of these is the customer experience of needing to go to a separate website to fully register a wrestler to join a team and be compliant with 

Key Findings

Overall Registration Completion

• USA Wrestling Required: 7,095 completed registrations
• USA Wrestling Not Required: 9,816 completed registrations

Cart Abandonment Rates

We define cart abandonment as a customer that stopped mid-way through registration and never returned to complete their registration. 

• USA Wrestling Required: 25.9% (1,841 abandoned carts out of 7,095 attempts)
• USA Wrestling Not Required: 18.7% (1,839 abandoned carts out of 9,816 attempts)

This represents a 7.2 percentage point increase in cart abandonment when the USA Wrestling card is required.

Abandonment by Registration Step

When analyzing at which step users abandoned their registration, we observed a dramatic difference at the wrestler information step:

USA Wrestling Required:

• Personal Information: 10.76%
• Add Wrestler: 18.14%
• Wrestler Info: 47.64%
• Agreements: 1.85%
• Registration: 21.62%

USA Wrestling Not Required:

• Personal Information: 14.74%
• Add Wrestler: 25.29%
• Wrestler Info: 15.77%
• Agreements: 5.71%
• Registration: 38.50%

The data reveals that abandonment at the wrestler information step—where USA Wrestling card information is requested—increases from 15% to 47% of all abandoned carts when the card is required.

Statistical Analysis

To quantify the impact, we calculated the relative increase in abandonment rates:

Relative increase = ((25.9% - 18.7%) / 18.7%) × 100 = 38.5%

This calculation indicates that users are 38.5% more likely to abandon their registration when USA Wrestling card information is required compared to when it is not required.

Implications

The data suggests that requiring USA Wrestling card information creates a significant friction point in the registration process. We've kept the data as broad as possible to achieve as fair and stable statistical result as we can, but the effect is more pronounced when looking at states where wrestling is a small, but emerging sport. If you are a WrestlingIQ Customer, run the 'In Progress Registration Report' to see people who have abandoned your registration and follow up to understand more about what happened.

Conclusion

This analysis provides data-backed evidence that requiring participants to purchase an athlete insurance card on their own results in a significant loss in potential wrestlers. 

If you are a club owner, coach, or admin, there are ways to fix this problem! 

1. If you want to continue with USA Wrestling or AAU cards as your sole liability coverage, both systems allow you to bulk buy cards on behalf of participants. Learn more about how to use WrestlingIQ to export the exact template needed to bulk purchase cards. 
2. Purchase a private insurance policy. Your wrestlers can still purchase cards to participate in local tournaments, but you'll likely get better coverage, have more completed registrations, and spend less time on managing cards for insurance compliance. If you are a WrestlingIQ customer, you can learn more about private insurance built just for wrestling teams here.