From 204 high school wrestlers in 1989 to record-breaking numbers today, the sport’s long-overlooked revolution is now impossible to ignore—just in time for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
If you were to ask 100 random Americans what the nation’s fastest-growing high school sport is, few would come up with the correct answer: girls’ wrestling.
The release of the documentary All American, which chronicles the challenges on and off the mat of three wrestlers, Naomi, Jo and Arham, arrives at a pivotal moment in the trailblazing journey of girls’ and women’s wrestling in the United States.
Today, a record 47 state high school associations will crown girls’ wrestling champions, with more states adding full-team competitions every year.
At the collegiate level, participation has surged. Earlier this year, the NCAA officially named women’s wrestling as its 91st championship sport. The number of college programs offering women’s wrestling has ballooned—as evidenced by the fact that the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics will soon hold its fourth national championship for women’s wrestling.
At the youth level, USA Wrestling’s iconic Fargo tournament drew more than 2,200 girls this year—a number that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Team USA’s women are now global powerhouses, routinely medaling in world and Olympic competitions.
To the observer or new fan, girls’ and women’s wrestling seem like a sudden marvel, but the road to our current apex is filled with a long history of resistance, sacrifice and struggle. For years, even after the passage of Title IX in 1972, wrestling remained male-dominated, with opportunities for girls on the mat scarce and resistance to our inclusion supercharged.
… How did teenage girls break down the barriers of this fiercely guarded male-only sport and become the fastest growing high school sport in our nation?
For so many girls and women on the mat today, our story dates back to 1989, when five American women—Afsoon Roshanzamir, Asia DeWeese, Marie Ziegler, Janet Trussell and Leia Kawaii—traveled to Switzerland for the Women’s World Freestyle Championships, the first ever Women’s World Championship in which a U.S. team entered. Despite winning three medals during that tournament, they had no financial or organizational support, no national recognition, or parades; yet they persisted, representing a country whose wrestling gatekeepers had little interest or belief in our participation.
Despite the hostility, their courage to compete at that time sparked the enduring flame of women’s wrestling in the United States that still reverberates.
Back then, a tiny fraction of girls wrestled in high school. In 1989, the National Federation of State High School Associations—the main body that governs high school athletics—reported that only 204 girls were wrestling at 25 schools nationwide, with virtually all of them on boys’ teams. Yet word spread about the women who had competed in Switzerland and what their example meant.
The following year, in 1990, the first official U.S. Senior Women’s World Team Trials event was held in Vallejo, Calif., with the winners qualifying for the World Championships in Tokyo, Japan. The dominant theme of that weekend was not competition but gratitude and community after years of isolation. Girls who had long been alone in wrestling swapped their stories and techniques, molding a foundation for the sports that continued long after that tournament.
That sense of community has remained at the forefront of women’s wrestling and made it into a sport where every girl and their circumstances are welcomed.
In the three decades since that tournament, we’ve fought for and won recognition, launching new frontiers in youth sports, high school, college and internationally.
In 1993, the University of Minnesota Morris became the first college to sanction a women’s wrestling team.
A little over a decade later, in 2004, after similar trailblazing efforts among international leaders of the world’s oldest sport, women’s freestyle wrestling made its Olympic debut in Athens, confirming what has always been evident: women belong in wrestling.
Despite this remarkable work, advancements for women in college, in world championships and in the Olympics, were not being reflected in high schools, where progress has come more slowly. Hawaii became the first state to sanction girls’ wrestling in 1998, but it took another 17 painstaking years for five more states to follow its lead. Even if they opened their doors to form a girls’ team, they weren’t convinced that enough girls would show up to justify the effort.
So how did teenage girls break down the barriers of this fiercely guarded male-only sport and become the fastest growing high school sport in our nation?
One courageous girl at a time, like Naomi.
One courageous girl at a time, like Arham.
And one courageous girl at a time, like Jojo.
Their stories and those of countless girls across our country reflect how, day by day, communities and a wrestling establishment, which had once wholly rejected girls’ wrestling, began to embrace and rally behind it.
Now, as we look forward to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where for the first time, our women will compete for gold on U.S. soil on the world’s most significant athletic stage in the sport they saved from Olympic extinction.
In that moment in Los Angeles under the Olympic flame, we will close the chapter of our trailblazing journey and launch our modern era.
