The girls wrestling team has improved and grown a lot over the past few years, according to the coaches at Heritage High School. It has exploded statewide as many girls are getting involved in the sport of wrestling.
Girls used to have to wrestle boys to compete, but then a rule was changed to “not allow girls to compete against boys,” according to Coach Craft. That is when girls wrestling really started to grow, as there was a limited number of girls to wrestle and more needed to join to be able to compete. Over the last three or four years it has grown for a couple other reasons, like collegiate programs with women wrestling, and also “whenever they introduced women’s wrestling as an Olympic Sport, I think that’s slowly allowed the sport to get larger.” says Coach Wolfe. According to the coach, there are more than double the amount of girls they had last year.
Sophomore wrestler Hadley Akers began wrestling in 8th grade and said that “there was one girl every tournament and I was the only girl on the team in middle school.” That being said, the girls wrestling team has grown “a lot” over the last few years…