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(Youth1 Wrestling) - Guy Sako has experienced the devastation that skin infections can cause.

Sako was the head wrestling coach for the Cleveland-based Westshore Wrestling Club in 2004 when, one by one, his team members contracted fungal infections. What began with one wrestler suffering through the infection during the first few weeks of practice quickly became a team-wide problem.

“I had close to 100 wrestlers who had come down with ring worm,” Sako said. “It completely wiped out our team. Because it ran rampant through the team, the school that we trained in came in and shut down our program and kicked us out of the school.”

Skin infections can be spread a number of different ways though Sako isn’t sure how his team became infected. The most common form of contamination comes through skin-to-skin contact. It can also be spread via contact with items that have been touched by people with the disease, such as towels shared after bathing and drying off or shared athletic equipment.

The most common skin infection found in wrestling is ringworm, which is also known as Tinea Corporis. Ring worm is a fungal infection that appears on the body as a red and scaly ring formation with a clear center. Other common types of skin infections among wrestlers include herpes simplex, staphylococcus infection (staph infection), impetigo and MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which, in recent years, has emerged as the most serious form of staph infection.


MRSA is resistant to some antibiotics and if untreated can prove to be deadly. A number of MRSA victims have lost limbs or even succumbed to the potentially deadly disease contracting MRSA and other staph infections can be prevented.

“There are a number of steps that athletes and coaches can take to help prevent this risk of outbreak in their programs,” Kyle Harris, a Certified Athletic Trainer at Bucks
County Community College in
Newtown, PA, said.  “It really boils down to some simple choices and practices. Proper hygiene is always necessary by always showering immediately after activity and properly treating and bandaging wounds on your body.

“Many reported cases of MRSA begin looking as a pimple or ingrown hair. Usually athletes will write it off as just that and within hours or days the infection has spread and become serious. It’s important for athletes to understand that if they feel they have an ingrown hair or an infected hair follicle to get it checked out and be on the lookout for it to get worse.”

Sako believes in education and promoting proper hygiene, so much so that his experience with the disease led him to develop his own line of soap which his players use after practice and matches.

“Practicing proper hygiene and performing daily skin checks on yourself and teammates is a simple way to decrease the chances of an outbreak,” Sako said. “When my whole team went down with ring worm, I knew it was time to create a product that would help combat the growth and spread of skin infections.

“We can coach and train for hours upon hours, but we won’t look at something that can sideline us in an instant. It’s important for coaches and trainers to take 5 to 10 minutes to educate their team and athletes on outbreak symptoms and prevention tips.”

More than 30 percent of the
U.S. population are carriers of the staph bacteria, according to Staph-infection-resources.com. The number of children hospitalized with resistant staph infections was 10 times higher, however, between 2000 and 2010 than during the previous decade. Yet for most, staph is harmless.

When a healthy athlete contracts staph it usually will not become a serious matter, according to Dr. Naomi Grobstein of
Family Health Center in
Montclair, New Jersey. She labeled it more of a nuisance but said that if proper care and treatment aren’t performed at the on-set, it could very well become a serious health issue.

In 2004, the Westshore Wrestling Club’s season came to an abrupt end. The school administration came in and shut down the program, as the wrestling room they called home, was quarantined and disinfected from top to bottom. It took a full season for Sako’s team to recover.