Wrestling for respect: Women's sport making slow but steady progress
By KELLY BEATON, Courier Sports Writer

Terry Steiner called the U.S.A. Wrestling offices seeking a letter of recommendation — no more, no less.

An eighth-year college assistant wrestling coach, Steiner simply wanted a piece of paper to help give him a new challenge — and maybe a higher tax bracket.

Yet, after a brief whirlwind of sweet-talking by the powers-that-be, the coach, a former all-American wrestler at Iowa, found himself standing before a squad of unlikely competitors.

It was June 2002 in New York City. Steiner, a former 150-pound bull chock full of testosterone, had just walked nervously into his first practice as coach of a U.S. National team barely two years away from the Athens Olympics.

Due to the unfamiliar nature of the group, Steiner felt like the new kid in class, wishing to slink silently to the back of the classroom.

The group was, after all, comprised solely of women.

“It was new territory for everyone,” he recalled recently.

“The first practice, I was demonstrating technique on a girl. ... I’m thinking, ‘Do I touch here? Do I touch there?’

“(But) I made a decision right there that they’re athletes, whether they’re men or women ... We sell wrestling as a sport for all sizes and all shapes, so why isn’t this a sport of women?”

With that, the now 36-year-old national coach got over his initial unease. And his U.S. women’s national squad has scaled many of its initial hurdles as a result.

Since Steiner’s maiden voyage with that first U.S. women’s Olympic team, women’s wrestling has taken significant strides toward legitimizing itself.

First, Steiner’s U.S. squad claimed a silver and a bronze at the 2004 Olympics. And this weekend, for the second time, three of the nearly half-dozen U.S. women’s collegiate teams will take to the mat at the UNI-Dome, for the NWCA National Duals.

“Having (women’s wrestling) at the national duals is a big thing,” Steiner said. “We have our foot in the door.”

Make no mistake, though. The sport of women’s wrestling still has a long way to travel. Many fans in Cedar Falls this weekend will be baring witness to their first bouts featuring females — if, that is, they grant their attention to the women’s grapplers at all.

WHERE WOMEN’S WRESTLING WORKS

If women’s wrestling is still little more than a novelty, side-show act, somebody forgot to tell Stephany Lee.

Lee, a junior from Missouri Valley College currently ranked No. 1 nationally at 158.5 pounds, wrestled for years in her native Hawaii without drawing so much as a second glance.

“People in Hawaii, they’re more open-minded,” noted Lee, who grew up in one of just two U.S. states to have their own sanctioned state wrestling tournaments for girls.

“If I were to wrestle a guy in practice and beat him,” she continued, “they wouldn’t really get mad.”

Lee, a former national judo champion, brings an unblemished mark to Cedar Falls this weekend. Of course, her wrestling upbringing featured luxuries few other female wrestlers enjoy. In her native Hawaii, where wrestling is simply thought of as another martial art, it’s not uncommon to walk into a wrestling room and find 30 boys countered by an even 30 girls.

That’s a decidedly uncommon occurrence in most of the U.S. For instance, according to USA Today, a 2003-04 survey by the National Federation of State Associations reported that at that time just 4,008 of America’s 242,708 high school wrestlers (1.7 percent) were female.

And the few girls who have enjoyed success competing against boys on the prep level often had fathers for coaches, thus widening their window of opportunity in a sport usually open only to those sporting ‘Y’ chromosomes.

What makes the U.S.’ lack of acceptance of women’s wrestling all the more irksome to those like Steiner is its popularity elsewhere around the globe, like in China and Canada.

ARE COACHES CLOSING DOORS?

The reasons why most male coaches look at women wrestlers with a skewed view are many: Some say the sport simply isn’t safe for girls.

Others state their distaste bluntly.

“It’s a no-win situation for the guy,” said Steve Knipp, a former longtime Waterloo East head coach who now runs youth tournaments. “If you go out and don’t win the match (against a girl), you’re belittled forever.

“And it’s not very safe for girls to wrestle at the high school level,” he added. “They can get hurt.”

Most of the relatively few females that have had success countering boys on the prep level have done so at light weights n like 103 pounds n where strength isn’t as much of a factor as the upper weights.

Steiner noted that the life-lessons wrestling can teach know no gender. So perhaps having girls wrestle alongside boys on the high school level isn’t such a wild idea, he argued.

“What high school boy couldn’t use a little more respect for the opposite sex?” Steiner pondered aloud. “Maybe (he’ll) appreciate her determination.”

To date, the U.S. women’s national squad has held its own n it won the 2003 world dual meet championships, for instance. But Steiner said his squad’s foothold near the mountaintop could be a shaky one if women’s wrestling doesn’t start getting more support on our nation’s lower levels.

“Now that we’re an Olympic sport, it brings credibility,” explained the former four-time all-American at Iowa (1989-93). “(But) if we don’t have high school coaches open their doors to girls, if we don’t have college coaches open their doors to girls, we’re not going to be here long.

“We have to get our development going.”

Steiner closed his case on why women’s wrestling should be made more mainstream with what would seem to be a question worth pondering.

“For a sport like wrestling, that struggles anyway for attention and struggles for respect, how can inviting another half of the population into the sport hurt us?” he asked.

For his final pieces of evidence, the coach could turn to exhibits ’A’ and ’B’: A pair of gleaming 2004 Olympic medals.

Contact Kelly Beaton at (319) 291-1456 or kelly.beaton@wcfcourier.com

********************************BREAKOUT******************************

The following states have had female wrestlers advance to their state prep tournament against boys*:

n Alaska

n Illinois

n Maryland

n Nebraska

n Maine

n Oklahoma

n Virginia

n Washington

* n Texas and Hawaii have separate state sanctioned tournaments for girls