Aaron Harris blew his whistle and 20-plus pairs of wrestlers began rolling, spinning and twisting on red mats that cover most of the floor inside Smyrna High’s Ron Eby Wrestling Room.
That made it a typical moment for Harris, the Smyrna coach, as he began teaching various techniques and tactics. On the wall behind him loomed a list of Smyrna’s 61 state wrestling champions dating to 1970. They’d gotten there through hundreds of sweaty hours of similar drilling.
But despite the familiar sounds, scenes and surroundings, the Sunday afternoon gathering was actually quite unique.
In fact, in Delaware, it was unprecedented.
All the wrestlers tangling with each other were girls.
And the sheer number of them hinted at what is now happening in a sport that has long been a male-dominated domain, treasured for its gritty demands and the mental and physical one-on-one test it offers.
The National Federation of State High School Associations recently reported that girls wrestling’s “growth in participants and championships” the past five years surpasses any other female sport. Evidence in Delaware supports that.
“I love to challenge myself,” Caravel Academy eighth-grader Natalie Radecki said of wrestling’s lure during a brief break from Sunday’s session.
Like many female wrestlers, Radecki got into the sport because of her brother. Eddie Radecki, just one year older, was a state 106-pound champion from Caravel last year as an 8th-grader. Now the 80-pound Natalie willingly and effectively challenges her Caravel male varsity teammates and frequently wins in middle school matches against boys.
“I saw him doing it,” said Natalie, who first wrestled at age 6, “and I was like, ‘That looks fun.’ I never really heard any of my friends doing that. ‘Do girls even do that?’ I was like, ‘Well maybe I can try.’ I tried it and I liked it and as I started growing up I started seeing more and more girls coming out.”
Hodgson Vo-Tech 113-pounder Katarina Austin became the first female to compete in the DIAA individual championships in 2018. The senior qualified with a fifth-place finish at the Blue Hen Conference Tournament.
Emily Thode, now a junior at Milford, became the first female to win a match in the DIAA tournament last season with a first-round pin at 106 pounds. She also won a match in consolations. Her older brother Jack, a Milford senior, is a two-time state champ.
“I was very excited,” Thode said of her accomplishment, “because I knew it’s starting something. More girls will want to come out and wrestle if they see one girl, or multiple girls, making an impact, even making history, or even not making history. Then they’ll want to try it and the sport will grow and we’ll have our own teams and state tournaments and it would just be a growing sport.”
According to the Delaware Wrestling Alliance, which has long championed the sport and its participants, Thode is one of 35 girls certified on boys high school teams in Delaware this season, 20 more than just four years ago. Another 20 girls, most from Smyrna, are on the Delaware Girls Wrestling Club.
More than a few of these female wrestlers have, on occasion, won their matchups against boys and “made them cry” as a result, one mother observing Sunday’s action said.
Ideally, however, more girls would participate so females could wrestle each other.
That’ll happen Sunday when many of the state’s female wrestlers will take part in a “Wrestle-Around” in the Smyrna High gym. Delaware Wrestling Alliance’s Team Delaware takes on the Misfits Girls Wrestling Club of Pennsylvania at 10 a.m. It’s an effort to create some statewide solidarity and promote girls wrestling.
“It’s a movement,” Delaware Wrestle Alliance founder Vic Leonard said Sunday. “We want to get to the point where girls wrestling can be a varsity sport in Delaware.”
Sunday’s event is an initial step in that direction. There will be another Feb. 13 at Smyrna – the All-Delaware Girls Wrestle-Around.
Sunday’s practice was the first organized gathering of many of the state’s female wrestlers and put together by the Delaware Wrestling Alliance.
It’s hoped that girls will get more opportunities to wrestle other girls instead of having to match up with boys, who typically have strength advantages just based on human anatomy even if weight may be the same.
“It just shows that it’s growing,” Thode said of Sunday’s all-girls practice, “and maybe someday we won’t have to compete against guys where we’re at a disadvantage and can wrestle against girls. That would be amazing.”
One of the girls who couldn’t attend Sunday’s session at Smyrna was busy wrestling for Delaware Military Academy’s team on the second day of the Delcastle Invitational. Junior 120-pounder Alyssa Mahan won two bouts there.
Wrestling at 120, Mahan also won a bout at the DIAA Tournament last year. This season, she had a 49-second pin in the quarterfinals of the Milford Invitational, where she placed fifth. Mahan is currently ranked 11th nationally among girls at 122 pounds by USA Wrestling.
On Sunday, Thode, the only female member of the Milford wrestling team, got to work out on the mat with Katie Simancek, the only female on the Lake Forest team.
A junior, Simancek just moved to Delaware from Hawaii, where her high school had full junior varsity and varsity girls wrestling teams.
“Every single high school there had jayvee and varsity for girls,” marveled her father Dan, a 1996 Maryland state wrestling champion at Baltimore’s Dundalk High.
Katie was involved in the martial art of jiu-jitsu before transitioning to wrestling in high school.
“It just gives you an even shot,” Katie said of being on an all-girls team.
“I really do like it. It’s an independent thing,” she said of how wrestlers have no one to rely on but themselves, which is part of the appeal.
Delaware’s history with female wrestlers making a mark began when Jenna Pavlik broke into the Cape Henlopen varsity lineup as a freshman in 1997-98 and got a pin in her second match. Pavlik eventually placed as high as seventh in the rugged Henlopen Conference meet.
Pavlik also excelled in girls-only competitions, winning several national titles and getting a silver medal at the Cadet World Championships in Poland, before graduating in 2001. Pavlik later was a U.S. senior freestyle champ and coached at Woodbridge.
There are now 31 states sanctioning girls high school wrestling, with 25 coming on board since 2018, including neighboring Maryland and New Jersey.
The federation’s most recent participation survey of high school sports, which is from the 2018-19 school year, showed 21,124 girls on wrestling teams. That was nearly triple the 7,351 from 2009-10. A USA Wrestling survey for 2019-20 showed 28,447 female participants on club and high school teams.
Recent growth led to the establishment of weight classes specific to girls high school wrestling beginning in 2023-24. They range from 100 to 235 pounds, with those in between depending on whether there are 12, 13 or 14 weight classes. Boys high school wrestling currently has 14 divisions from 106 through 285.
In September, the University of Iowa, which won its 24th NCAA men’s wrestling team title in 2021, made headlines when it became the first school from a Power Five conference to add women’s wrestling and just the third from Division I, joining Sacred Heart and Presbyterian.
There are 35 other NCAA Division II and III teams and another 36 at the NAIA level, according to the NCAA.
When Harris, a former state champion at Caesar Rodney, invited girls from Smyrna to join a fledgling team, he wasn’t surprised so many expressed interest.
“I feel like girls have been itching to wrestle,” he said, “especially in this environment where Smyrna wrestling is so strong. My sales pitch was ‘You don’t have to wrestle boys. You don’t have to practice with boys. You don’t have to compete against boys.’ Once I sold that it was easy.”
The draw, he said, is the same as it might be for a male.
“You don’t have to be a great athlete,” he said. “You don’t have to be big and strong. You just have to have a good work ethic.”
One of those Smyrna wrestlers, Jae Johnson, had actually tried the sport briefly with the Smyrna Little Wrestlers youth club. But that was two weeks before the coronavirus pandemic hit in March of 2019 and shut down sports.
Now a high school freshman, she decided to join the new Smyrna girls team.
“We want to get out there and have fun, just like the boys,” said Johnson, who also plays softball. “I just love rough-housing around, stuff like that.”
Caesar Rodney assistant coach Brandy Dolt wrestled collegiately at NAIA Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Missouri. She began competinggrowing up in a family of 10 children in Chesapeake, Virginia, because her brothers wrestled.
She was joined at Smyrna on Sunday by daughters Makenna and Emarie, who are on the CR wrestling team, and seventh-grader Callie, who also wrestles. Like Mahan, Makenna and Emarie Dolt and Thode also won matches over boys at the Milford Invitational in December.
“Everything that the boys get out of the sport, girls can, too,” Brandy Dolt said. “The discipline, the confidence. Every life lesson that you learn is even more empowering for these girls to get out of this sport.”
Competing in an arduous sport such as wrestling can help them bridge that ongoing gender gap. And those sisters who often have to tag along to their brothers’ practices, Dolt said, shouldn’t have to just sit and watch.
They can get on the mat, too.
“These kinds of events are super important for them,” said Dolt, a mother of seven whose husband Chad also wrestled at Missouri Valley. “We have five girls on the high school team at Caesar Rodney. They come to something like this and they can say ‘We’re not alone.’ It gives them hope.”
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