Finding the right coach

While Burke said Iowa wasn’t necessarily looking for a coach with NCAA experience, she wanted someone who had experience with women’s wrestlers and a passion that rivaled fans in the state.

Because Iowa was setting the description for a Power Five women’s wrestling head coach, Burke said, the Hawkeyes were looking specifically for experience with women’s wrestlers.

Chun has ample experience with women’s wrestlers along with familiarity with the university and Carver-Hawkeye Arena. She almost tried to join the Hawkeye men’s wrestling team while considering if she wanted to attend Iowa in 1999.

“Wrestling was a new sport to me, and I just wanted to dive into, like, who’s the best, and I wanted to be a part of it,” Chun said. “… Obviously, I never reached out to the coach or anything. I just thought I could show up and be like, ‘Hey, can I get a space on the mat or maybe a manager or something?’”

Ultimately, Chun knew she wasn’t going to get the wrestling experience she wanted at Iowa. So, she became one of the first women’s wrestlers on scholarship at Missouri Valley College.

“That was cool that I was on a girls program team at Missouri Valley,” Chun said. “Not everyone on the team came from an all-girls program, and I had 25 others from all over the country, so that was exciting; sizing each other up, scrapping.”

Chun was a versatile athlete in high school in Hawaii, competing in wrestling, swimming, judo, and water polo. She started wrestling in high school and quickly found success. Chun was the first girls wrestler to win a state title in the first-ever sanctioned tournament in Hawaii in 1998.

She made the senior women’s national team while she was still competing at Missouri Valley. Chun was also a two-time university national champion and placed fourth at the University World Championships in 2003.

But one of Chun’s brightest moments as a wrestler came in what she thought was an out-of-body experience at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. She qualified for the London Olympics at a sold-out Carver in 2012.

“That pit, that Carver floor, I don’t know, like, engulfed me and took me to another place that I didn’t know where I was,” Chun said of her experience. “ … I wasn’t present, and I won, and I don’t know how … I don’t know if it was pressure because I wasn’t even there.”

The 48kg freestyle wrestler won a bronze medal at the London Games in 2012 to go along with her fifth-place finish in Beijing in 2008.

Chun moved into coaching after her storied wrestling career. She started as the West Virginia men’s wrestling program’s operations assistant then moved on to work as an assistant coach for the U.S. women’s national team in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from 2017-21.

While there, she worked with former Hawkeye wrestler Terry Steiner to guide the women’s national team to 17 world and four Olympic medals.

But Chun was already planning to leave her post in Colorado Springs before she heard of the Iowa women’s wrestling head coaching position. She was going to move back to Marshall, Missouri, to coach at her alma mater and reunite with her longtime partner.

When Iowa announced its women’s wrestling program, however, she had a decision to make. She could either end eight years of long distance with her partner, who is a Missouri Valley College professor, or put her name in to coach the first-ever Power Five women’s wrestling program.

“It was finally going to be like, ‘Oh, hey, after eight years we’re gonna be in one place.’” Chun said. “And then Iowa announced, and then I really had a lot of conversations with my significant other — hard conversations. Because it was something that we’re both looking forward to, as far as being the same place, but it was also like, ‘How do we pass an opportunity like this?’”

But Chun and her partner decided the opportunity in Iowa City was too good to let go without trying. So, Chun put her name in to become Iowa’s first women’s wrestling coach in October 2021.

“I was a little hesitant just because I wasn’t sure,” Chun said. “That was, like, resolidifying the direction that I was taking our relationship to long distance again. But as I was going through the process, interviews or Zoom interviews, I started getting competitive again. My competitive juices came out.”

Chun was officially announced as Iowa’s first women’s wrestling coach on Nov. 18, 2021, giving her an opportunity to build a new legacy in Iowa City.

While she’s still doing long-distance with her partner, her move to Iowa has slightly closed the gap — what was a 10-hour drive from Colorado Springs to Marshall became a 4.5-hour trip from Iowa City.