Carver-Hawkeye Arena’s overhead lights flicker as thunderous applause fills the air. Smoke begins to spill out of the tunnel. A spotlight shines right down into the arena’s center.
The Iowa women’s wrestling team filters in, looking up to the Hawkeye fans adorned in black and gold. Hands interlocked, the women exchange smiles with fans.
As they take to the mat for introductions, the smell of the fog machine seeps throughout the arena. The churn of the machine is hardly audible over the raucous applause still rocking the seats.
This program, which did not exist a mere three years ago, has drawn thousands of eyes to the mat.
Collins Hoeger, 9, watches in awe as the first match begins, the women twisting and turning with their competitors. Collins managed to snag a seat in the first few rows, close to the floor with her parents and sister by her side.
As more matches take to the mat, the girls intently examine the wrestlers’ every move and strategize.
Iowa dominates. They win all their matches against Cornell College. Collins sits and watches them all.
Collins had competed in matches of her own in Anamosa just that morning and, much like the Iowa athletes, won with a clean sweep. She and her family piled into the car, driving 40 miles with her medal in hand to see Iowa’s matchup.
The young wrestler is part of the first generation of girls who will grow up watching women wrestle on the mat in college.
Iowa remains the only Power Four school in the country with a women’s wrestling program and sits alongside only three other Division I schools with the sport.
Iowa City, dubbed Wrestletown, USA, sets the largest stage in the country for women’s wrestling. Young girls all around Iowa now have the opportunity to sit in the front row.
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NCAA sanctions
Women’s wrestling became an official sport, and the NCAA’s 91st championship sport, on Jan. 17. The first championship will take place in 2026 and feature women from Division I, Division II, and Division III programs facing off for the first time on the NCAA stage in Nashville, Tennessee.
Prior to this designation, women’s wrestling was officially considered an “emerging sport for women” by the NCAA in 2020. An emerging sport is an opportunity for programs to expand athletic opportunities to more women athletes. Women’s wrestling was one of the six female sports under the category, along with rugby, acrobatics, tumbling, equestrian, stunt, and triathlon.
With only three other Division I schools — Sacred Heart University, Lindenwood University, and Presbyterian College — sponsoring a program, many Division II, Division III, and NAIA schools carry the weight of recruiting for collegiate women’s wrestling.
Schools like Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.
Wartburg’s women’s wrestling team is one of 18 programs around the state that offers the sport and has since 2023. It is also the school first-year Jasmine Luedtke decided to take her talents to following her high school career.
The 19-year-old from Ottumwa, Iowa, had enjoyed a prominent run, qualifying for Iowa Boys’ State twice — one of only four girls to ever reach the tournament — and winning Girls’ State twice. Luedtke’s love for wrestling began in elementary school, as she was constantly surrounded by family members participating in the sport.
“I started wrestling as a practice partner [with boys], and then I fell in love with it,” Luedtke said.
She ditched her other athletic obligations for wrestling matches at the age of 10. As Luedtke grew into a teenager, she continued wrestling on the boys’ wresting team.
A program for young girls didn’t yet exist.
“As I got into high school, it started to be, ‘Oh, why are you wrestling boys on a varsity team. You don’t belong on a boys’ varsity team,’” Luedtke said.
For Luedtke, this criticism continued as the seasons went on.
“It broke me down a bit,” she said.
Despite this, Luedtke said a strong mindset helps her continue to grow as a wrestler. She continued to qualify for Boys’ State twice in her two years of wrestling pre-sanctioning.
Luedtke remembers the very moment when her life changed, and wrestling became a permanent part of her immediate future.
On Jan. 22, 2022, Luedtke sat in an Olive Garden, surrounded by dim lights and all-you-can-eat breadsticks. She was eating to prepare and fuel herself for her final match in the state tournament.
With Italian music playing and family talking around the table, Luedtke peered down at her phone and scrolled through social media.
A post popped up on her feed that would not only change her own high school career, but also the future of wrestling across the state: Girls’ wrestling was sanctioned in Iowa. From that moment on, girls aged 14 to 18 would be able to test their wrestling skills against others in sanctioned teams across the state.
“I always assumed wrestling would’ve been sanctioned later on — definitely when I was in college or even past college,” Luedtke said.
For girls’ wrestling to be sanctioned, 50 schools had to agree to host a program to meet the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union’s 15 percent school participation rule for sanctioning.
This was no problem.
Before sanctioning, 165 schools already had girls participating on the boys’ team, per Iowa AAU. These already remarkable numbers helped the schools meet the 50-school threshold quickly and garnered bipartisan support from government officials including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Christina Bohannan, and others.
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Sanctioning in the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union means there would be accreditation for schools that had a program and agreed to support a yearly state tournament. This support would provide the girls their own teams to wrestle on along with more formal events and duals.
Iowa girls wrestling has seen explosive growth since sanctioning, jumping from 56 teams to 216 teams — a 286 percent increase. This massive interest among girls wanting to wrestle led to the IGHSAU splitting the sport into two divisions. Over 5,000 athletes competed in the girls’ state meet in 2024, selling out Xtream Arena in Coralville for the two-day event.
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Youth AAU
Hollers and footsteps echo through a concrete hallway tucked away in the corner of Prairie Point Middle School in Cedar Rapids. Parents line the walls, some tying the laces of their daughter’s bright, small shoes. The girls smile excitedly as they prepare to run into practice.
Sounds of light footsteps circle the wrestling room as 80 girls enter. Collins helps lead the pack with bubble braids bouncing on her back.
The girls warm up as they roll and crawl around the room, bumping into one another on occasion. As they sweat, they exchange glances with their coaches and are met with encouraging nods.
As warmups wind down, the girls sit on the ground out of breath, looking up at a group of four fathers who run the practices. With whispers still echoing throughout the room, the girls shush each other and listen to what their coaches have to say.
“Hello Hawks,” Chris Hoeger, head coach of the Hammerin’ Hawks AAU team and Collins’ father, says.
The AAU team, made up of girls from around Linn and Johnson counties, teaches young girls how to wrestle in the face of a new era of sanctioning. The team splits into two groups — beginners and advanced — as the girls learn and develop skills that will eventually take them to their first tournament.
From beginner’s exhibitions to the Iowa state tournament, the club includes something for girls of any experience level but also stresses the importance of getting out and trying the sport.
“In school, I wasn’t trying my best, but then when I was wrestling, I started to try hard,” Maci Bruce, 14, said.
Bruce got her wrestling start with the Hammerin’ Hawks and credited the sport with helping her focus more in school. She is now earning near-straight A’s.
“I know a lot of people don’t want to live in Iowa. But wrestling [here] is cool because I don’t have to travel far to see girls wrestling [at the collegiate level],” Bruce said.
The excitement surrounding the Iowa women’s wrestling team and other Iowa collegiate wrestling radiates through the young girls’ team as they learn and see the sport grow. Bruce and many other athletes from Hammerin’ Hawks make their way to Iowa City often to get a glimpse of the elite Iowa women’s wrestling team members competing on the mat.
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Iowa stays elite
The University of Iowa finished the 2023-24 season 16-0 in duals and won the NWCA championship. These successes prompted Iowa to begin the season ranked No. 2 in the country. They quickly moved up to No. 1 following the first week of competition.
The Iowa team features four women from the state of Iowa.
First-year Naomi Simon competes for Iowa at 180 pounds. During her high school career, she became the first girl to win Iowa’s girls’ state wrestling championship four years in a row. The transition from Decorah High School’s elite team to the UI was seamless, she said.
With Iowa being a large institution, Simon said resources are what set it apart for her. As a health and human physiology major, she saw the strength of Iowa for her academics as well as athletics. This, and a successful visit, landed her as one of Iowa’s two homegrown recruits last year.
“I feel like I get to be part of something bigger than myself,” Simon said.
With thousands of fans packing the stands for home duals, she can see girls that were like her growing up.
As Iowa’s head coach, Clarissa Chun has been with the team since the start in 2023.
“The state of Iowa and the word ‘wrestling’ and the sport of wrestling is synonymous and is the fabric of the state,” Chun said.
This support from the state has been shown through donations and increased attendance at home meets. With over 4,000 people present at the recent Iowa Duals II, fans from around the state have shown up for the new team.
As Chun worked to build the team, she explored the new world of recruiting. Chun coached many of her current wrestlers previously on Team USA and other high-level teams, but she had yet to choose a team of her own making.
With finding new recruits and new rules now on Chun’s shoulders, she worked to build Iowa’s team from the ground up.
Women were hand-picked, recruited from California to Hawaii. Seventeen states are represented in Iowa’s current lineup.
“There’s a lot of amazing young women that care about athletics, who care about wrestling, but they also care about their future,” Chun said.
This rings true for the women on the team who span majors from business to nursing and almost everything in between. The presence of an academically strong institution helps support athletes who may not compete post-college.
“I think having more Division I programs at the Power Four conferences provides more opportunities for young women out there that you know are striving for that level of excellence,” Chun said.
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Team bonds
Growth is starting at the high school level. From long bus rides to hours waiting at tournaments, high schoolers are finding friends in places they never would have without the sport.
There is one person the Prairie High School girls’ wrestling team cites as a leader: Mackenzie Childers. At just 17, Childers is one of the captains of the team.
Childers began wrestling at six years old when her mom worked concession stands at high school events. She watched as the boys’ wrestling team filed into the gym to practice and asked to watch.
Then, she asked her mom if she could wrestle. Despite warnings of being the only girl on the team, Childers was insistent.
She started on a team called “Bad Boys Wrestling,” which quickly changed to “West Side Wrestling” following her joining the team. Throughout her childhood, she remained the only girl on her teams.
Childers was in her freshman year when girls’ wrestling was sanctioned. With this change, she became one of the pillars of the program as it began. As senior wrestler Neve Hurley began her career, she looked to Childers as one of her role models, despite being the same age.
“[Mackenzie] can just kind of take control of a room,” Hurley said.
Her ability to run the room is what has encouraged more and more girls to work hard. Childers runs warmups, sprints, and helps younger girls with new moves if they need it.
With her return from an injury this year, Childers has dominated the 130-pound weight class and has gone undefeated as of Jan. 23. Childers is one of the few girls who grew up around wrestling in Iowa and recognizes wrestling as a major factor for who she is today.
As treasurer of the National Honor Society at Prairie High School, Childers maintains high grades along with her wrestling training. This leadership on the mat and in the classroom is something that Childers speaks with her family about often.
Every week, the Prairie girls wrestlers line the hallways after practice and open their mindset binders to write. With prompts from their coaches, the girls fill up pages reflecting on their successes, failures, and most importantly, their goals.
Since beginning wrestling, Hurley and her teammates have found new outlooks on what it means to be a wrestler.
“I think just being around it so much, you realize that wrestling is how determined you are, how much work ethic you can put into a sport,” Hurley said.
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The future
As Iowa’s girls grow into adulthood, there is now a future where they can commit to a Power Four school and compete in front of thousands of fans. Soldier Salute in Coralville is one of those main stages. The sun has barely risen in Cedar Rapids as Collins wakes up and prepares for the meet.
Her wall is a love letter to women’s wrestling.
Dozens of medals line the walls from all her first-place wins at tournaments. Signed posters from the Iowa women’s wrestling team sit on her dresser.
Next to the door hangs a picture of a sparkly pink shoe that says, “Mindset is everything.”
Collins prances through her kitchen and into her parents’ room, where she gets her hair done. She chooses small space buns so that she can match with Iowa women’s wrestler Val Solorio.
As her mom laces the last elastic hair tie through her hair, they hear rustling sounds in the kitchen. High school wrestlers Mackenzie Childers and Luisa Meade appear in the room with a wrapped present.
“Happy late birthday, Collins,” they say, coming in to sit on the bed.
Collins jumps up and opens her gift. It’s a small LED light with an image of two girls wrestling. Collins’ name is engraved in the middle.
A smile brightens Collins’ face, and she thanks the older girls, running to the nearest port to plug it in.
The sign illuminates blue and red before finally landing on her favorite color — purple. As the light reflects across her skin, she looks around excitedly.
The girls examine the details of the sign; one sharp line sticks out.
A ponytail.
They smile and put the light down as Collins runs to her room to pick out her shoes. Her whole outfit is cohesive with shades of dark blues in every piece of clothing.
The girls sit in the living room, preparing to head out to watch women’s wrestling at Soldier Salute. Two new generations of wrestlers sit side by side on the gray couch.
Two generations that could one day take center mat at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.