When Olympic silver medalist Adeline Gray tells people that she does wrestling for a living, they often have the same reaction: “Do women wrestle?”
She doesn't hear that anymore.
Over the past decade, participation in women's and women's wrestling has grown at an incredible rate as perceptions and infrastructure surrounding the sport have changed. The number of high school girls competing in wrestling has increased fivefold since 2013, according to statistics compiled by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). It nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
“I feel like I'm not the weird kid that was wrestling anymore,” Gray told USA TODAY Sports.
After decades when the only competitive wrestling option for high school girls was to compete head-to-head against boys, 45 states now sanction girls' wrestling as its own event with its own state championships. Meanwhile, in college, Iowa State last year became the first school in the Power Five to start a women's wrestling program, and the NCAA plans to elevate women's wrestling to a championship sport starting in 2026.
“It really was like, 'If you build it, they will come,'” said Clarissa Chun, head coach of the Iowa women's wrestling team. “If you open the door and give (women) a place and a space and an opportunity, and you coach them, they're going to want to do these things. Just because it was a sport doesn't mean girls do it too.'' I don't want to play that sport either. ”
The growth of women's wrestling in the United States has been fueled by the international success of Team USA, which has brought five Olympic medals in women's wrestling competitions in the last two Olympics. This includes the gold medal won by Tamira Mensah-Stock at the Tokyo Olympics. Helen Maroulis of Rio de Janeiro. It has also benefited from the policy efforts of advocacy groups such as Wrestle Like a Girl, a nonprofit founded in 2016 to improve access to sports for girls.
But Sally Roberts, the group's co-founder and CEO, believes that the rapid increase in participation in women's and women's wrestling is due to changing perceptions of women's sports and femininity in general. There is also a cultural background.
“People had to get used to the idea that their daughters weren't quiet, quiet, feminine women who wanted to stay at home,” Roberts said. “What we're building is that we're building strong girls and women who can own their own space, their own voice, their own body, and be fierce leaders.”
More opportunities for women to wrestle with other women
Prior to helping launch Wrestle Like a Girl, Roberts won two bronze medals at the World Mat Championships with Team USA in 2003 and 2005.
Like many of her contemporaries, she got her start in wrestling competing against and against boys — in her case, at Federal Way High School in Washington in the late 1990s. .
For many years, wrestling was one of the few sports where girls had the only option to compete against boys at the boys and high school levels. In 1998, Hawaii, where Chun grew up, became the first state in the nation to sanction women's wrestling at the high school level, followed shortly by Texas.
“I think some people don't like seeing girls and women wrestling at first,” said Chun, who won a bronze medal at the 2012 Olympics. She said, “It's no different than the pre-Title IX days of, 'Oh, women can't run, they can't sweat, they can't get tired, they can't handle this.'” It's a very similar mentality. was. ”
Female athletes on men's wrestling teams were often seen as a novelty and the subject of feel-good articles in local newspapers that framed the men's and women's matches as proof of gender equality. But in reality, the social, cultural and modesty barriers that Roberts describes often left the girls feeling isolated or on metaphorical islands.
As Roberts sees it, the recent growth isn't because women are more interested in wrestling than they were 10 years ago. It simply means more opportunities to compete with other women.
“If you look at any state, the moment sanctions started, we saw growth that almost doubled, if not more than double,” she said. “At the end of the day, we want girls to be able to compete and participate with girls of the same sex, just like we want other sports to do.”
Three states held their first sanctioned high school girls wrestling championships this year, and a fourth state (Louisiana) has announced it will sanction the sport next year. Currently, there are only five states in the country that do not offer women's wrestling: Delaware, Indiana, Mississippi, Vermont, and Virginia.
Asked why some states have been so slow to embrace women's wrestling, Roberts said state high school sports associations impose sanctions on the sport until it reaches or exceeds certain participation standards. He cited an example of a government refusing to do so, calling this an “unfortunate position.”
“Girls have to show interest in order to promote opportunities, but in fact the opposite is true,” she said.
Roberts added that girls' wrestling plays an important role in individual schools because it often attracts girls who might not be interested in other sports. We welcome girls of all heights and body types.
“I think what's unique about wrestling is that there are classes,” said NFHS CEO Carissa Niehoff. She says, “You can find a spot for a petite young woman or a big young woman, but I don't feel like there's any kind of value added or subtracted from that size.”
Dreaming of the future of women's professional wrestling
Gray, who competed against boys in high school, still laments the talented women who fled wrestling as they moved up the ranks. She said a lot of people just have a hard time seeing their future in the sport.
Women's wrestling did not enter the Olympic program until the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, where women had four weight classes in freestyle wrestling, meaning their chances of winning gold, compared to seven weight classes for men. was. Two more weight classes were added in 2016, and the women's and men's wrestling competitions will each consist of six weight classes at the 2024 Paris Olympics later this summer.
The same is true at the collegiate level, where women's wrestling has been at the lower end of the system, only recently appearing in Division I. Presbyterian became the first DI school to field a varsity team in the sport in 2019. Iowa State went undefeated in its first year and finished in second place.
Gray, who won 10 medals in her career at world championships and the Olympics, said the increased opportunities for college admissions and the possibility of earning scholarships at schools like Iowa State are encouraging more girls to take up the sport. We hope this will help you stay involved.
“It feels more tangible than just the small number of athletes who make it to the Olympics,” she said. “I think this is a great stepping stone to expand the possibilities for women to pursue their dreams of attending university or playing sports.”
With the NCAA's announcement that women's wrestling is on track to secure championship status by 2026, the question is no longer if other big-name schools will follow Iowa State's lead, but which schools and when. That's what it means.
Roberts and others' hope is that the growth of women's wrestling at the Division I level will foster interest and growth at the high school level, which in turn will help develop more talented women's wrestlers for Team USA. It could also help foster a new era in the sport by producing more female coaches, executives, administrators and media personnel.
“I think people will realize that women's wrestling is not the step-sister or little sister of men's wrestling,” Roberts said. “It's a sport that has its own field and requires its own revenue streams and coaches. And it will succeed in every way we can imagine.”
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.
