CORALVILLE, Iowa — The Iowa City area is a fitting place to host the NCAA’s first national championship tournament for women’s wrestling.
“What is it they say? ‘Wrestletown USA?'” McKendree University coach Alexio Garcia said. “I think it’s a great place for wrestling to be hosted. You go to some places, maybe a hundred people know wrestling. There, everyone lives it.”
The event will be held Friday and Saturday at Xtream Arena in Coralville, a couple miles from the campus for the University of Iowa, which is widely regarded as the epicenter of the sport.
“It really is ‘Wrestletown USA,'” Iowa coach Clarissa Chun said. “We’ve had World Cup events here. We’re going to have other big events here. So this is a big deal for our sport.”
Women’s wrestling moved from “emerging sport” to championship status within the NCAA in January 2025. There are 111 NCAA programs across all divisions. Iowa is among just six in Division I and the only one from a power conference.
Where the team competition is concerned, this NCAA event — a traditional tournament in which wrestlers compete in weight-class brackets for individual titles while earning points for their programs along the way — isn’t divided into divisions. So a school like McKendree, a Division II school located in Lebanon, Illinois, is competing against Iowa of the Big Ten, along with North Central College, a Division III school in Naperville, Illinois, that won the national duals competition this winter with victories over McKendree and Iowa.
McKendree is ranked No. 1 in the National Wrestling Coaches Association women’s poll and followed by Iowa and North Central. Each school won regional titles and advanced the maximum 10 wrestlers to the NCAA tournament.
“The fact that we’re in this position now is nothing short of pretty amazing,” Garcia said. “I think we’re all lucky and blessed to be witnessing it, to be honest.”
It’s an event that Chun and her team have been waiting for since the 2023-24 season, the first in women’s wrestling for the Hawkeyes; the school’s men’s team owns 24 national titles — the first in 1975 and the most recent one in 2021 — along with 86 individual NCAA championships.
“It’s going to be pretty electric,” Chun said. “It was pretty cool at regionals to see them get so excited when they saw the NCAA regional trophies. They were like, ‘It’s real. It’s happening.’ We’ve heard about it all year, but to see that and what it looks like puts a little extra on them, the feeling that this is happening.”
Wrestling organizations began a movement in 2017 to take the sport to the college level. The National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championships began in 2020 as a tournament for NCAA programs, the same year the country’s largest sanctioning body for college sports designated women’s wrestling an emerging sport. The sport can be considered for championship status when at least 40 schools sponsor it at the varsity level.
“Women’s wrestling is so competitive,” Chun said. “Some of the wrestlers in this tournament have been in the Olympics or on world teams. That’s what’s so exciting about the trajectory of where women’s wrestling is in the United States. Because what is that tagline that the NCAA has? ‘Olympians made here.’ That’s the step in the direction that the NCAA can offer.”
McKendree began its women’s wrestling program in 2013 and was a member of the Women’s College Wrestling Association, which governed schools with athletic programs in not only the National Collegiate Athletic Association, but those in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics as well as junior colleges.
“Our culture and environment have grown tremendously,” said Garcia, who is in his fifth season as coach. “The town that we live in is really nice. (St. Louis) is about a half-hour away. So it’s an attractive place. I think what’s drawing people here to our program at this point is the culture, the attitude.”
Garcia has four wrestlers who are the top seeds in their NCAA brackets: Heather Crull (103 pounds), Yu Sakamoto (117), Cameron Guerin (131) and Tristan Kelly (207).
Iowa, which is 49-1 in duals in its three seasons, has three No. 1 seeds: Reese Laramendy (145), Kennedy Blades (160) and Kylie Welker (171). Blades was an Olympic silver medalist at the 2024 Paris Games.
Garcia understands the significance of this tournament.
“I’m excited for this, to say the least,” Garcia said. “I’m very proud of what we’re going to represent, not just my team, but everyone that’s going there. I have three daughters of my own, so hopefully 10 years from now they’ll be wrestling in it. And I know that at that point it’s going to be a lot bigger.”