Women’s wrestling is pretty central in my life—it’s my sport background, where my people are, my “profession”. . . I am a friend of wrestling and sort of just live a wrestling life. Because I am so close to the sport on the daily, and because I stepped away from the trenches in the journalism space shortly after Olympic Team Trials, I sometimes forget what it’s like to know any different. I’ll slip on an assumption that people—young girls—know about girls wrestling and the opportunities that are out there for them. But it’s not true. Many girl wrestlers don’t know what opportunities they have because there’s a gap in coverage and communication. It’s a constant battle we’re taking ground on—convincing board members and schools to add the opportunity, convincing coaches to invest because girls deserve the space and opportunity and then the same with the media. And I feel very fierce about it.
When I started Transition Wrestling in 2019 I was running toward a future I saw with clarity. I was working toward a world I knew could exist with parity and exposure and women seeing themselves as belonging in the wrestling space without question. The mission I identified, to strengthen the global position of women through stories of effort, excellence and overcoming adversity, addressed all of that. And the guiding principle was that visibility aided growth, created opportunity, offered a place for connection and a sense of belonging without underlying prerequisites that inadvertently show up when girls try to compete on boys teams. I lived through the experience of not having this platform, and, in an all of a sudden kind of way, it felt so nonsensical to me that what I was trying to create didn’t already exist.
Since getting the site off the ground in 2019 I will have people send me articles/blogs they’ve written to read and share. I’ve also seen an uptick in one-off blogs by high school, college-age, and senior level competitors. What strikes me, but isn’t very surprising, is the lingering sentiment about visibility, opportunity, belonging and a theme that girls can do anything. It hits home even more when it comes from a wrestler sharing their story and not from a media outlet—another nod to how we need to share stories even if there isn’t a space yet.
Last week a high school student, Annaliese Witmer, sent me a piece, Girls can wrestle too, that she wrote for Bellefonte’s Red & White student newspaper in Pennsylvania. It’s a great read.
In the article she shares how she grew as a wrestling fan because of her brother Zack Witmer, who is now a freshman at Columbia. In 2019, she attended Final X at Rutgers and saw firsthand that girls could wrestle, too. This now 16-year old watched Adeline Gray, a two-time Olympian and six-time world champion in women’s freestyle wrestling, make the U.S. senior world team in person. The sentence that grabbed me, her aha moment, is captured here as she writes, “Everyone says “Girls can do anything,” but up until that moment, I never realized how truly important it was to have a role model like me in wrestling.”
This is it. That one sentence. It’s loaded and ready to be unpacked with all the reasons we need sanctioning, opportunities, media coverage and story telling. We could be dreamers and visionaries, but we just don’t know what we don’t know. And sometimes until we see something bigger we don’t even have the pictures to imagine and then realize our potential.
I know this is true. Me, a dreamer of wild proportions, couldn’t see the possibility even when I was running with clarity toward that future. It was the fall of 2020 when I had this moment. I was on journalism duty at the Hawkeye Wrestling Club Showdown in Iowa City. The experience stunned me. Here’s what I wrote back then on Instagram.
So today, as I read and then reread Witmer’s words, I am just reminded of the battle. I am humbled by the opportunity to help grow and support wrestlers. And, I feel this tug at my heart to be conveying this sentiment that young girls and grown women are united by.
This intersection where women’s wrestling, sport, permeates the little bubble we exist in because we are people first is what sport is really all about.
To my people out there doing your thing in a world not ready for you yet, this is the battle we’re enrolled in as path-makers. Stay the course. Let’s embrace all the joy and growing pains that come along with laying the track while we’re on the go.
All the love, in life through sport.
//GLK
From TW: 9 Ways Collegiate Coverage Impacts Women’s Wrestling
