Gable: ‘Everybody’s watching’ Iowa, as women’s wrestling grows

CEDAR RAPIDS — All eyes are on Iowa, legendary Hawkeye wrestling coach Dan Gable said Friday during the closing keynote portion of The Gazette’s Iowa Ideas virtual conference.

Specifically, he said, all eyes are on his fellow keynote speaker Clarissa Chun and the new — and first — NCAA Division I, Power Five conference women’s wrestling program she’s leading at the University of Iowa.

“Everybody's watching, and I think we're on display,” Gable said to a question about whether and when more Division I schools will add teams and join the female wrestling fray. “I think we have a good setup. I don't think it'll take long once they see the positives.”

But eyes on the UI’s powerhouse wrestling programming are nothing new — just ask Chun, who 23 years before being introduced in November 2021 as the first head coach of the first Hawkeye women’s wrestling team had trained her own sights on Iowa City.

“I actually applied to the University of Iowa when I was a senior in high school,” Chun said. “I got in. I wanted to come wrestle here. Knowing that they didn’t have women’s wrestling, I thought maybe they’ll be a chance to be a manager, be around the program. I just wanted to be around a successful program.”

As a senior in her Hawaii high school, when she captured the state wrestling title, Chun touted her plans to attend the UI “not to wrestle, but in hopes to want to wrestle.”

Months later, the private Missouri Valley College reached out about its plans to become the first U.S. college or university to offer a women’s varsity wrestling scholarship program, and Chun pivoted.

“But who didn’t want to be a Hawkeye?” she asked Friday.

That sentiment persists today — especially among the female wrestling elite — as the UI, a year after announcing its women’s wrestling team, remains the only Power Five conference school to do so.

“I don't think that there aren’t programs trying to make it happen,” Chun said, noting institutions have inquired — including some in the Ivy League. “I’ve heard some Ivy's reached out asking, how has Iowa done it?”

UI Athletics administrators have connected with other athletic directors “trying to help them explore what it took,” Chun said.

But, for now, “Iowa is definitely ahead of the time.”

“So I’m taking it. It's great. I love it, I love the head start in that sense,” Chun said. “I love the opportunities that young girls get to have now”

The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Wrestle Like a Girl is behind a lot of those opportunities with its growing list of initiatives — including one advocating for more college-level teams, succeeding in bringing women’s wrestling under the NCAA umbrella as an emerging sport in 2020.

At the scholastic level, the organization is pushing to grow the number of states that recognize girl’s wrestling as an official high school sport — a move Iowa made earlier this year.

Gable said UI’s leadership at the Power Five level makes the decision to launch a team an easy one for other Division I universities, and he and Chun voiced confidence more schools will make the leap.

“We're not going to quit fighting,” Chun said. “We're going to continue to do all the things we need to do to show the growth of women's wrestling and why it needs to happen. It's not a matter of it not happening. It's a matter of when.”

The Hawkeye men’s wrestling program — which Gable led as head coach for 21 years, winning 21 Big Ten Conference championships, 15 NCAA team titles and 45 individual national championships — is among the most successful in history, last winning a national team title in 2021.

Coordination with and promotion alongside that elite men’s program could stir up excitement for the Hawkeye women, who are supposed to start competing in the 2023-2024 academic year.

“You’re going to have to have people come and really be entertained, that’s just the bottom line — good wrestling, good excitement,” Gable said, suggesting intermingling some women’s matches with the men’s duals. “To be able to just catch somebody’s eye, throw in a match here or there initially, and get those people rockin’ and rollin’.”

Chun said the Athletics Department is mulling how best to roll out its stacked squad of female wrestlers — but she expressed some concern about juxtaposing the men, who wrestle folkstyle rules in college, with the women, who wrestle freestyle after high school.

“If we're side by side, it might look a little bit confusing from one match to the next,” she said, suggesting arranging matches on the same day instead. “Those are the things that we talk about — how to roll it out, what would it look like for the first time, and how to best educate the fans.”

With one year left in which to grow the program, Chun said that while her squad — in some respects — has the best shot at the pool of top female recruits, an athlete still “has to be the right fit.”

“We're an individual sport,” she said. “But we need the team to be there to push each other forward and lift each other up when needed.”

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