Women’s wrestling icon, pioneer flies to Iowa City for Hawkeye dual in Carver

IOWA CITY — Once in a while — amid the clamor and chaos of crowds and jeers and protests and press — someone would walk up to a 45-pound, third-grade Tricia Saunders and thank her for “what you’re doing for women’s lib.”

“I didn’t know what that was,” Saunders, now 58, of Phoenix, Ariz., said. “Strangers were grabbing me by the arm. But I just wanted to go out and wrestle and be like my friends.”

So she did, despite the “hostility and a weird fascination thing with people watching.”

“Some would scream for kids to hurt me,” Saunders said of her experience as an 8-year-old in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Sometimes those things were scary.”

But she didn’t let it stop her from stepping on the mat to compete in what then was a near exclusively-boys sport.

And five decades later — thanks to that trailblazing persistence — girls are wrestling too. Lots of girls.

Fastest growing sport

Women’s wrestling is the fastest-growing high school sport in the country. Where only six states had sanctioned girls’ wrestling at the high school level in 2017, 45 states now do, including Iowa, which joined the club three years ago in 2022.

The sanctioning movement has quadrupled the number of high school girls’ teams nationally — spiking the number of high school girl wrestlers to more than 64,250 during the 2023-24 season, more than double the 31,654 in 2021-22, according to USA Wrestling.

Similarly, women’s wrestling is among the fastest growing sports at the collegiate level — with the NCAA Divisions I, II and III this week voting to add women’s wrestling as a championship sport. Women’s wrestling, an Olympic sport since 2004, becomes the NCAA’s 91st championship sport, with 2026 booked for the first National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championship.

For the current 2024-25 season, 93 NCAA schools intend to sponsor women’s wrestling — an increase of 41 schools from the 2022-23 season. The University of Iowa in September 2021 became the first Power Five NCAA Division I campus to add women’s wrestling — a monumental move that a younger Saunders might not have imagined.

‘Pretty amazing’

But this evening, Saunders will get to experience first hand women’s wrestling inside what some deem the best place in the world to watch wrestling: the University of Iowa’s Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

“It’s pretty amazing for WrestleTown USA to not only host but meet the goat of goats. The pioneer of pioneers,” Think Iowa City President Josh Schamberger said. “There is no bigger name in the history of women’s wrestling in this country than Tricia Saunders.

“She started it all.”

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Saunders will serve as honorary captain for the final home Hawkeye duals of the women’s second competition season.

She flew in Thursday in time to join the women’s team at FilmScene in Iowa City for a sneak peek at FloWrestling’s documentary on the inaugural Hawkeye women’s team.

Backdropped by that historic entrée of women’s wrestling to the NCAA Power Five, Saunders said she wished she could have done more and that this could have come sooner.

“I did what I could to move the needle and make changes, but it wasn’t enough to stop the next girl from having to go through the exact same conversation,” Saunders said of her experience in the 1970s and 1980s. “And a lot of them never made it.”

‘I just did’

Although Saunders ended up winning four world championship gold medals in the 1990s and a world silver medal — making her the first American woman to win a world wrestling title and the only American to win more than two — she did not have the opportunity to compete at the Olympics, given women’s wrestling wasn’t offered as an Olympic sport until 2004, when she was 38.

She did help coach the first U.S. women’s wrestling team that year — after completing her competitive career in 2001 having never lost a single match to an American competitor.

That legacy — of course — came despite being booted from the sport as a teenager, when her district’s school board shut her out of the room because she was a girl. And Saunders could have left a lot sooner, had she buckled under pressure of the strident social ideology that wrestling is for boys.

At age 8 in 1975, Saunders mowed her way through boys district and regional brackets — qualifying her for the Amateur Athletic Union’s state tournament, where she showed up to compete and was told she couldn’t weigh in.

“I remember him telling my mom, ‘Girls can’t wrestle,’” Saunders said. “And I’m like, ‘I just did.’”

She watched her brothers compete that day, even though she, too, had qualified. And her family found a team of lawyers who fought for her under Title IX, earning her a spot to compete at the AAU youth national championships, where she placed second in Greco and fourth in freestyle wrestling.

During her youth career — during which she only wrestled boys — Saunders racked up 181 wins to 23 losses, becoming the first female to win a Michigan state title and first female regional national champion.

After her school board-imposed teenage hiatus, Saunders returned to the sport at age 22. Her brother was wrestling at Arizona State University, so she moved in with him and trained in that room. She’d find the best wrestlers, who would “beat the tar out of me.”

“When you take a beating in the room like that, you think, ‘I’m gonna work harder so that doesn’t happen to me again,’” she said.

‘Not a good reason’

Coming to Iowa City this weekend, Saunders told Schamberger she was most excited to watch the women practice in state-of-the-art facilities with top-notch coaches and the best partners in the country — having just secured their second-straight national dual championship on Jan. 11.

“Think about that,” Schamberger said. “She is most excited to attend and watch a women’s team practicing together.”

Throughout her wrestling career, Saunders stayed true to her belief that “wrestling people are great” and “we have the best sport,” while also wondering why women weren’t allowed in sooner.

Girls weren’t playing soccer when she was a kid, for example, but advancement in that sport predated wrestling by decades, Saunders said.

“It’s just a bittersweet moment because of all the people who missed this opportunity to do something that could have been everything to them,” she said. “For no reason. We had mats. We had shoes. We had great athletes and coaches, and we didn’t have enough vision and leadership to make this go down.”

When asked why her parents didn’t discourage her from wrestling when she was little, Saunders said, “I don’t think they could find a way to feel OK about themselves and explain it to me.”

“Are we going to tell you no matter how good you want to be, you can’t because you’re a girl?”

Had society asked itself that question sooner, women’s wrestling might have solidified its standing long ago.

“There was not a good reason,” she said. “Just a bunch of bad ones that people echoed.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

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