My cheeks stung. I couldn’t believe it. “We can’t let you wrestle here ‘cause you’re a girl.” The coach had waited outside the wrestling room for me. It was like I wasn’t even welcome to set foot in that room. I was in shock. “Are you serious?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m afraid….” He trailed off. I just stood there in disbelief. When I had researched the program, they seemed eager for participants, never saying that girls were unwelcome. It seemed like everything I had gotten excited for, waited for, worked for, it was all crashing down around me. “But, uhhh, we could have you be a stat girl if you still want to be involved...” This is where things went from bad to worse. I felt like screaming at him. I was hurt before, but now I was angry. I was more than angry; I was personally offended. Being a stat girl meat that I would get to see all the boys wrestle; to watch them do what I wanted to be doing all along. It would be like dangling a carrot right in front of my face, but never letting me close enough to grab hold of anything. I could visualize the boys coming over to flirt with me at the stat table before they started their matches. My blood began to boil. It took everything inside me not to scream and swear and cry at this coach.

All I could muster was, “I don’t wanna be a stat girl.” I want to think that he understood, like on a wrestler to wrestler level. I want to think he understood my love of the sport, my desire to have a second chance at wrestling after high school, and to feel the freedom that I felt while on the mat. “We have had some problems in the past with girls being on the team…I’m sorry.” I was at a pretty conservative university, I felt like I had to understand this statement. I didn’t think I had been flirtatious with any of the guys during my tryout. I had only come to learn and become stronger, with strictly professional intentions. There are always reasons behind why rules are made. I felt angry at whatever girls in the past had made mistakes that had led to this rule. Breaking me out of my stupor of thought, the coach said, “Well thanks for coming to try out…” So now he was trying to get rid of me, I thought. Great. Go be with your stupid team of stupid boys. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Yeah, thanks.” I turned to leave feeling so defeated. I tried so hard to choke back tears on my walk back home. In a daze, I texted my mom a brief explanation of what had happened.

She Facetimed me when I got back to my apartment. By this time, I was crying. More like howling, really. It was so painful for me to explain what had happened; I was so hurt. I cried for almost the next three days straight. I felt so out of place at this university. Over the next few weeks, I often told my mom that I wanted to come home. I felt so unwanted. I didn’t want anything to do with a university that wouldn’t allow a female student the same opportunity as male students. As a first semester student, I felt so unwelcome at what was supposed to be my new home. After this experience, I was so hesitant to try anything. I was so afraid of being torn down again just for being a woman. It was like my skill level and ability to contribute to a team had been overlooked just because I’m a woman; because of something I couldn’t control. For the rest of that winter, I spent a lot of time stuck in my apartment. I had been discriminated against, and I was so hurt.

The culture I was living in seemed to value women who dedicated all their time to preparing to be a wife and mother. Now don’t get me wrong, I look forward to the day when I can be someone’s wife and a mother to a bunch of little ones. But I felt so undervalued at this university because I wanted to participate in a “boy’s” sport. Did anyone ever think that I might be able to teach my sons about wrestling one day? To help them become strong wrestlers? Apparently not. Now rewind three and a half years: I had wrestled only a year at my high school before taking a difficult test that allowed me to start college early. I made the decision to pursue college academics, rather than to stay at my high school. I had been told that my community college had a wrestling team that I could try out for. This comforted me because my biggest life regret to this day has been leaving my high school wrestling team. I felt a glimmer of hope in going to this community college. I had a second chance with the sport I fell in love with. In my first semester at the community college, I asked around about the wrestling program, I was so desperate to start wrestling again. I soon found out that the wrestling program had been cut, due to the school’s lack of funding. There would be no team for the next few years. I was disappointed, but I had plans to transfer to a university after a couple years. Surely I would get my chance to wrestle there.

After my two years at community college were up, I was excited to be attending Brigham Young University-Idaho. I knew that they did not have intercollegiate sports, but I had heard from friends and family that there were intramural sports available for students. Hoping that they had wrestling, I looked at the university’s intramural sports webpage. I was absolutely overjoyed when I saw that they had intramural competitive wrestling. Immediately, I began changing the workouts I did at the gym so that I could be prepared to make a stellar impression at the tryouts. I had been lifting weights and exercising purely for aesthetic purposes, but I started pushing myself differently to be more functionally fit. I was doing as much as I could to make sure that I would be ready. I understood that I would be wrestling mostly boys, so I would need to be able to hold my own. The time came for me to leave California to begin my new life in Idaho. I was ecstatic to start wrestling again and I had told all my friends how excited I was.

On the day of tryouts, I pulled on my wrestling shoes and stepped on the mat; it felt so familiar as one of the coaches lead us through some warm ups. I was so happy to be there. During a drill, I had to wrestle this boy. We started out in referee’s position and the goal was to get a reversal. The penalty for the loser was 20 push-ups. I got the reversal, so I watched as he pushed ‘em out. I’ll never forget how I heard him start to complain. I never would have guessed in that moment that he was complaining about something that I would have sold my soul to do. But I never got the chance to tell him how lucky he was because I “can’t wrestle ‘cause I’m a girl.”