Not being a dickhead here, but I keep hearing this constant, recently circulating theme/pattern of sound bytes about how girl's wrestling is "growing," and about how it's still in it's embryonic stage, or things of the like. I'm baffled by such things. I'll explain. Ultimately, my argument is going to sound backwards, as I am on one hand claiming girl's wrestling 'ain't a kid anymore,' but I say that to say that the citing of the sport still in some sort of infancy to defend the choice of utterly watering it down by vaguely citing an objectionable notion of it being "necessary to facilitate further the boom period of a new sport," is an argument riddled with recency-bias, ignorant to the actual lifecycle phase the sport is in and, of course, relies on the suggestion of participation numbers reminiscent of the sports ACTUAL initial boom/early growth period which began by my count 20 freaking years ago. Legally, girls wrestling under the WIAA banner, is an adult. lastly, competitive levels which, rather than continuing the trend of tougher and tougher, instead visually harken straight back to the non-competitive beginnings, levels which conspicuously and tragically butt-in at the most inexplicable time, JUST when the sport was beginning to get exceptionally competitive as demonstrated beautifully by the filtering down of the best of the best, 16 man ALL CLASS state with top 8 placing after 15+ years of growth under the same format. To now bafflingly choose, as a sanctioning agency, to invoke the neolithic, 'scrappy-but-horrible' appearance of those ACTUAL embryonic days circa 2005-2010...

Lastly, just as an anecdotal thing, as I never hear this so much as cited at a distant glance, but the notion of girls competing against one another in legitimate, sanctioned wrestling contests is far from being a novel concept. Females wrestling in legitimate competition has been around at least as long as the post 1896 Olympics + amateur wrestling revival, as wrestling became the #2 most popular sport in America for a brief 20 year window.


Girls wrestling has been around 20 years now at the state tournament level. Yes, 2005 was the first year of girls wrestling in the Tacoma Dome, at state. It was a round-robin affair, no qualification process, invite format.