When Olympic silver medalist Adeline Gray used to tell people that she wrestled for a living, she said they often had the same response: “Women wrestle?”
She doesn’t hear that much anymore.
Over the past decade, participation figures in girls’ and women’s wrestling have grown at an eye-popping rate as the perceptions and infrastructure around the sport have changed. According to statistics compiled by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), the number of high school girls who competed in wrestling has quintupled since 2013. 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 who wrestled anymore,” Gray told USA TODAY Sports.
After decades in which high school girls’ only choice in wrestling was to compete directly against boys, 45 states have now sanctioned girls’ wrestling as its own event with its own state championships. In college, meanwhile, Iowa became the first Power Five school to start a women’s wrestling program last year, and the NCAA has plans to elevate women’s wrestling to a championship sport beginning in 2026.
“It really was an ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of thing,” said Clarissa Chun, the head coach of Iowa’s women’s wrestling team. “If you open that door and give (women) a place and space and give them the opportunity, and if you coach them, they want to do things like this. Just because it’s always been a boys’ sport doesn’t mean girls don’t want to do the sport, as well.”
The growth of women’s wrestling in the U.S. has been aided by the international success of Team USA, which brought home five Olympic medals in women’s wrestling events at the two most recent editions of the Games − including golds won by Tamyra Mensah-Stock in Tokyo and Helen Maroulis in Rio de Janeiro. And it’s benefitted from the policy efforts of advocacy groups such as Wrestle Like A Girl, a non-profit organization founded in 2016 to improve girls’ access to the sport.
But Sally Roberts, the group’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said the surging participation numbers in women’s and girls’ wrestling have also come against an important cultural backdrop − shifting perceptions about women’s sports, and femininity in general.
“People had to warm up to the idea that their daughters were more than these quiet, demure, feminine women that wanted to stay at home,” Roberts said. “(It was) recognizing that we were raising powerful girls and women that are going to be fierce leaders, that could own their space, their voice, their body.”
More opportunities for women to wrestle other women
Before she helped start Wrestle Like A Girl, Roberts won a pair of bronze medals at world championships for Team USA on the mat, in 2003 and 2005.
Like many of her contemporaries, she got her start in wrestling by competing with and against the boys − in her case, at Federal Way High School in Washington in the late 1990s.
For years, wrestling was one of the few sports where girls’ only choice was to compete against the boys at the youth and high school levels. Hawaii, where Chun grew up, became the first state in the country to sanction girls’ wrestling at the high school level in 1998. Texas followed shortly thereafter.
“I think sometimes some people might have a hard time seeing girls or women, initially, wrestle,” said Chun, who won Olympic bronze at the 2012 Games. “It’s no different than back in the day, before Title IX, where it was ‘oh women can’t run, they can’t get sweaty, they can’t get exhausted, they can’t handle this.’ It was a very similar mentality.”
Girls on the boys wrestling team were often viewed as novelties, the subject of feel-good stories in the local newspaper that framed male-female bouts as a testament to gender equality. But in reality, it often left girls feeling singled out or on a metaphorical island due to what Roberts described as social, cultural and modesty barriers.
The recent growth, as Roberts see it, wasn’t because women are more interested in wrestling now than they were a decade ago. It’s simply that they have more opportunities to compete against other women.
“When you look at any state, the moment that it became sanctioned, you saw growth nearly double if not more than double,” she said. “At the end of the day, girls want to be able to compete and participate against girls of their own sex, just as any other sport wants to do.”
Three states held their first sanctioned high school girls’ wrestling championships this year, while a fourth (Louisiana) announced that it would be sanctioning the sport next year. Delaware, Indiana, Mississippi, Vermont and Virginia are now the only five states in the country that do not offer girls’ wrestling.
When asked why some states have been so slow to embrace girls’ wrestling, Roberts cited cases in which the state high school sports association declined to sanction the sport until or unless it reached certain participation threshholds, which she called “an unfortunate position.”
“The girls are having to prove interest to facilitate opportunity, when it is actually the other way around,” she said.
Roberts added that girls’ wrestling plays a critical role at individual schools because it usually attracts girls who weren’t otherwise interested in other sports. It also welcomes girls with different statures and body types.
“The unique thing about wrestling, which I think is special, is that there are weight classes,” NFHS chief executive officer Karissa Niehoff said. “You can have a smaller young lady or a larger young lady find a place, and not feel that there’s any sort of addition or subtraction to the value of their size.”
Dreaming of a future in women’s wrestling
Gray, who also competed against boys in high school, still laments the talented women that fled wrestling when she was climbing up the ranks. She said many simply struggled to see a future for themselves in the sport.
Women’s wrestling did not join the Olympic program until the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, where the women got four weight classes in freestyle wrestling − or four chances to win gold medals − compared to seven for the men. Two additional weight classes were added in 2016, and women’s and men’s wrestling competitions will each consist of six weight classes at the 2024 Paris Olympics later this summer.
It’s been a similar story at the college level, where women’s wrestling has been presented in the lower rungs of the system but only recently emerged in Division I. Presbyterian College became the first DI school to field a varsity team in the sport in 2019. Iowa, which went undefeated in its inaugural season, is the second.
Gray, who has won 10 career medals at world championships or the Olympic Games, hopes the increase in college opportunities − and the potential of earning scholarships at schools such as Iowa − will help keep more girls involved in the sport.
“It feels more tangible than the very few that make it to the Olympics,” she said. “I think it’s a great stepping stone that broadens the ability for women to be able to dream about going to college and 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 whether other big-name universities will follow Iowa’s lead, but which schools and when.
The hope, for Roberts and others, is that the growth in women’s wrestling at the Division I level will supercharge interest and growth at the high school level, and in turn help develop more talented female wrestlers for Team USA. It could also help produce more female coaches, officials, administrators and media members − fueling a new era in the sport.
“I think people are going to recognize that women’s wrestling, it’s not the step-sister or little sister to men’s wrestling,” Roberts said. “It’s a sport in its own right that has its own vertical, deserves its own revenue stream, its own coaches. And it’s going to succeed in every way that we can imagine.”
Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on social media @Tom_Schad.
More Stories
USA Rugby 7s star Liz Tafuna to boost defending champions in expanded women’s competition at Hong Kong 10s
Utah women’s basketball team switched hotels after experiencing racism, says head coach
Kelly Slater set to call time on surfing career and retire ‘pretty soon’ | Surfing