The seeds were planted by the dreams and aspirations of women who aimed for gold medals on the world’s highest stages. They broke barriers and reshaped reality, showing how deeply wrestling could resonate with women. Just like a plant needs support to thrive, women’s wrestling needs allies to help it flourish and create space for women.

January also marks the time of the year when women’s NCAA leaders gather for their annual convention to conduct NCAA committee business. My attention will focus on the potential vote approving women’s collegiate freestyle to become their 91st championship sport.

If they vote in favor of approval, it sets the stage for some compelling questions about the future of female wrestling. For example, can girls and women’s wrestling become a more independent  and self-sustaining industry? More importantly, does freestyle wrestling offer the best opportunity for females to adopt a streamlined development and competition process based on one style of wrestling? 

I’m a student-athlete at Choate Rosemary Hall, a highly demanding academic institution for high schoolers. I plan to continue pursuing a rigorous education and to compete at a high level of wrestling in college. Trying to balance both worlds can feel overwhelming. At times, it feels like I have to pick between my education and my sport. Limited opportunities for women to pursue both high-level academics and wrestling along with the challenges of being in a male-dominated sport have forced me to find unique ways to deal with stress, insecurity, and burnout.

As the fastest growing sport in the US, wrestling is attracting new females to the sport. The US is well on it’s way to sanctioning girls wrestling in every state in order to have all-girls teams. However, while sanctioning is a work in progress and states are growing their participation numbers, this means many girls across the US who want to wrestle must compete against the boys. This poses a challenge for the athlete, the parents, and the coaches. This article chronicles two female athletes who were the only girls on their high school team. Forrest Molinari grew up wrestling in California, and continued her career to make world teams for Team USA. Rose Martines started wrestling her Junior year in Oregon, and completed her Senior year as the only female on her high school team. Neither athlete had a female wrestler come before them as the example for how to be the only girl on the boys team, they were the trend setters. As we continue to encourage girls to try this amazing sport, we are going to need the experiences of others to forge a path each generation that comes to the mat after us.

Warming up for competition is a non-negotiable part of any athlete’s routine, yet maintaining energy levels throughout a long competition day is often overlooked. Managing energy across multiple rounds ensures you're mentally and physically prepared to perform at your peak in every match. From the initial morning warm-up, through re-warming between matches, to cooling down afterward, each phase is essential for recovery and staying "in the zone."

As athletes, we all have our fears—those little voices in our heads that say, “What if I mess up?” or “What if I lose?” Whether it’s freezing up on the mat, letting ourselves down, or worrying about disappointing our coaches, fear is something we wrestle with every day. And the truth is, it doesn’t just go away as you get better at the sport. In fact, those fears can get louder. But here’s the game-changer: you don’t have to get rid of them. You just have to learn how to live with them.

There is a lot of pressure for young athletes to be successful. Being successful on the playing field has education, career, and social implications. The better the athlete, the greater the scholarship amount to play a collegiate sport, the greater chance of continuing on a professional level. The better the result, the more recognition the athlete or the parent receive from those around them. The notion that sport is fun, which instills healthy active lifestyles and teaches life skills, has been put on the back burner. The idea that multi-sport athletes produce whole athletes with better overall skills, has become second to specialization. It is believed that single-sport sport specific skills produces the highest quality. Here's the danger with this mentality: it feeds the mindset that if specializing at 18 years old is ideal, then specializing at 13 is even better. And if this is the case, then we should begin specializing our children in one sport at 8 to get an earlier start ahead of peers.

Rehydrating after weigh-ins is a critical step for an athlete to ensure their body is ready for competition. Wrestlers, whether they're beginners or seasoned competitors, need to pay special attention to how they manage their hydration after weight-ins as well as throughout the entire competition day.

Wrestling has a stigma about weight cutting, and often the wrestling community is perpetuating it ourselves. In my opinion, it is emphasized much too heavily and much too young. Through competing, coaching, and educating young wrestlers about the sport, I have observed that our young athletes are taught they might only be successful if they compete at a lower weight. The number of males and females I've spoken to who have decided not to continue their career onto a collegiate or international level, have mostly been due to burn out from weight cutting. When does it become impractical to maintain a weight class? Should our minds, bodies, technique, and love for the sport suffer? This post is meant to be a guide for young athletes to navigate the pressures they may be receiving to cut weight.

The 2024 Paris Olympics crossed a historic boundary. Never before has an Olympics had equal male and female competitors. The event also crossed a historic boundary in social media coverage, with athletes worldwide utilizing the event to grow their social media brands. However, even with a celebration of female athletes at this Olympic games, female wrestlers seemed to be left out of the general media conversation & coverage.

Choosing the right college wrestling program is a significant decision, particularly for female athletes. Beyond the typical considerations, such as academic fit and team culture, there are unique challenges and opportunities that female wrestlers and their families must navigate in today's evolving wrestling landscape.

As a beginner wrestler, how do you become effective in competition without obsessing over learning every technique? When we focus solely on the need to perfect technique, it can often prevent you from seeing the big picture. What is sport, but accepting the challenge from another competitor to compete to your best abilities? By simplifying the idea of sport, we can focus on being a fierce competitor, and focus on where to position yourself for the best advantage. I've seen many great wrestlers who learned how to be tough competitors without high level technique. In good time, the technique will come with work and repetition.

Wrestling has a problem: women aren't coming back to coach. And when they do, they face an uphill battle because they fail to internalize their own accomplishments. This is called Imposter Syndrome, a term coined in 1978 by a clinical psychologist. It has become a buzzword in recent years, and couldn't be more relevant to the sport of women's wrestling.