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.
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:
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
We define cart abandonment as a customer that stopped mid-way through registration and never returned to complete their registration.
This represents a 7.2 percentage point increase in cart abandonment when the USA Wrestling card is required.
When analyzing at which step users abandoned their registration, we observed a dramatic difference at the wrestler information step:
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.
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.
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.
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!