Young women wrestlers take sport to new levels of popularity

Jamie Hearl of Mount Airy High School was there in the back, a 4-foot-8 ball of fire who avoided wrestling for years because, in her eyes, it was a “boys sport.”

With her multi-colored braids, Jamie’s teammate, Hope Horan, was easy to spot. She started wrestling a few years ago after hearing it would make her a better football player.

Not far from Hope, Jordyn Cooper of Reynolds High School looked on. Tim Pittman, the wrestling coach at Reynolds who is always on the hunt for talent, saw her one day in the gym and thought she might make a good wrestler.

Victoria Darden stood in front of Jordyn in the group photo. She was so eager for other girls to join her on the wrestling team at Reynolds that she posted flyers in the girls restroom, encouraging them to give it a try.

Jamie, Hope, Jordyn and Victoria are just four of the young trailblazers who are taking girls wrestling in North Carolina to new levels.

“People aren’t putting girls in the corner of the wrestling room anymore,” said Breonnah Neal, a 2013 graduate of West Forsyth, who won 111 matches against boys, setting a state record that has since been broken.

Neal is now the women’s wrestling coach at Gannon University in Pennsylvania. “There are coaches now who want to coach girls and see the benefits of it,” she said. “It’s a whole lot better than it was.”

Though girls, such as Breonnah, have wrestled against boys for years in North Carolina, more girls teams are forming, allowing them to wrestle other girls and have their own dual team meets and tournaments.

The N.C. High School Athletics Association will officially sanction women’s wrestling for the 2023-24 season, a milestone in the sport’s evolution that should lead to a boom in the number of young women who come out for wrestling.

“Once girls feel like they’re on the same level playing field, it grows so fast,” Neal said. “When it becomes sanctioned, the numbers blow up.”

From 1998 to 2015, women’s high school wrestling was sanctioned in just six states — Hawaii, Texas, California, Washington, Alaska and Tennessee. Since then, 29 states have sanctioned the sport, said Cheryl Baynard of Hendersonville, who led the sanctioning push with her group, SanctionNC. Neal was among the members of the group.

The National Wrestling Coaches Association estimates that across the country 32,000 women wrestled in high school in 2022, up from 800 in 1994.

In North Carolina, the number of girls wrestling in high school programs jumped from 599 in 2022 to 1,024 in 2023, Baynard said.

“My personal belief is that we will double that next year,” she said.

Two schools in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools — Reynolds and West Forsyth — had enough girls in each weight division to field a full team.

Several other local schools had individual girl wrestlers who competed against boys in the regular season but participated in last weekend’s women’s invitational, which was run by the NCHSAA and N.C. USA Wrestling.

For the first time in the invitational’s history, girls had to qualify in four regionals held across the state. The top finishers advanced to the state invitational.

“Every year, we added one more piece to the invitational to make it more consistent with how boys go to the state tournament,” Baynard said.

Last Friday at the Rise sports complex in Bermuda Run, hundreds of people crowded around 12 mats cheering on girls who had qualified for the invitational championships and others who were wrestling in a showcase.

The sheer number of wrestlers and the intensity of the competition was a revelation, flipping on its head the antiquated notion that women should not engage in combat sports.

Pittman, the coach at Reynolds, counts himself as a convert.

“If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I’d be coaching girls wrestling, I’d have said, ‘No way.’ It was a fear thing to be honest with you, me getting out of my comfort zone,” said Pittman, who is in his third season as the Reynolds wrestling coach.

He had a change of heart a few years ago while running a wrestling camp in Rowan County. A young boy broke his arm on the first day of camp and the mother asked Pittman if her daughter could take his spot in the camp since she had already paid.

Pittman hesitated, then relented.

The young girl followed instructions to a T, doing everything the boys could do.

“She completely changed my outlook on women’s wrestling,” Pittman said. “It wasn’t that she was a girl and the other campers were guys. She was a wrestler. It’s not girls and guys. It’s wrestlers.”

Her name is Leah Edwards, and last Saturday, she became the state champion in the 114-pound weight class for East Rowan High School.

Hope of Mount Airy wound up finishing third in that class. Two years ago, Hope etched her name in the record books when she became the first female freshman to place in the men’s state championship with a fourth place finish in the 106 class.

“There’s something in me that makes me want to do big things,” Hope said.

All her life, Hope has been going against the grain, pushing herself to prove people wrong.

Raised by a single mom in a house with three brothers, she was the only girl on her middle school’s football team. Then, she stopped growing. When some folks suggested wrestling as a way to improve in football, she told them: “Y’all, that’s too far. No. No.”

She decided to give it a try anyway and wound up with a black eye in her first practice.

Her mom told her she didn’t have to continue, but Hope discovered that wrestling calmed her mind, made her mentally sharp.

“I’ve had little girls come up to me and say, ‘Oh my lord. You’re Hope Horan. I look up to you.’ It’s crazy. It’s like, man, people are watching me,” Hope said.

Little girls are watching her teammate, Jamie, too.

At nearly every tournament, young girls will come up to her and want a picture, said Jamie’s dad, Joey Hearl.

“It’s not specifically because it’s Jamie, but it’s that there are these girls who are showing them that just because you’re a lady doesn’t mean you can’t do this or do that. That’s neat and special to see that happening,” he said.

A college wrestler, Hearl urged Jamie to give it a try. She resisted.

“I’ll be the only girl. It will be weird,” she told him.

A friend dragged her to practice in 2021, the year that wrestling was pushed to late spring because of COVID. She saw Hope, but no other girls, just a bunch of cut, athletic boys tossing each other around.

“Oh crap,” she thought to herself. “This is not for me.”

“This is my place,” she said of the wrestling mat. “And I never really knew my place in sports because of my size. But in wrestling, you have the same strength, the same advantage.”

With some schools still not able to field a full women’s team, Jamie frequently wrestles against boys. Beating them is particularly gratifying.

“Everyone sees you and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a small girl.’ And they see a boy who’s ripped and jacked. And when you beat him, the gym is like, ‘What did we witness?’” she said, a big smile spreading across her face.

Still, she enjoys the camaraderie of being on a team with girls. The boy wrestlers are supportive, but a special bond has developed among the girl wrestlers.

“They’re going to cut up and be stupid,” she said of the boys, “but with the girls, it’s like family almost.”

Jamie finished as a state runner-up last weekend in the 100-weight division, losing 2-0 to Jeulenea Khang of Morganton Freedom.

If Jamie and Hope are the core of the Mount Airy team, Jordyn and Victoria are the foundation of Reynolds’ fledgling women’s team, which has doubled to 11 girls this year.

Inside the James Alexander wrestling room at Reynolds earlier this month, 1980s classic rock blared as dozens of boys and a handful of girls practiced drills.

Jordyn’s story is similar to Jamie’s. Invited by Pittman to swing by wrestling practice, she walked in then promptly walked out.

“I was intimidated,” Jordyn said.

When she heard the word wrestling, she had visions of World Wrestling Entertainment, best known as WWE.

“I thought, ‘I’ll get up in the air and boom!’” Jordyn said, breaking into giggles with Victoria, who sat on a couch next to her in Pittman’s tiny office.

“We didn’t know anything,” Victoria said.

Among the first to join the women’s team, the two sought each other out and have become good friends.

Without wrestling, Victoria isn’t sure she’d be on a sports team at Reynolds. She and Jordyn have both lost weight and gotten more physically and mentally fit while on the team.

And they’ve found a family with the other girls and boys in the program, some of whom came out to cheer them on at last weekend’s invitational.

“It’s home,” Victoria said.

Victoria and Jordyn placed in the regionals to advance to the state invitational last weekend. Though they both failed to advance to the championship round, what they and the other girls accomplished can’t be measured by takedowns and pins.

Through hard work, discipline and the courage to put on a singlet and step onto the mat, they set fire to a mountain of preconceived notions of what a girl should and should not do.

Victoria contemplated this the other day.

“It’s weird to think,” she said. “We’re making history.”