Lady Wildcats take to the mat

A shattered collarbone, rebuilt with screws and a metal plate, is the mark Weinberg first-year Ruby Becerra bears from high school wrestling. But the real threat to her career wasn’t the hard throw that broke her bone. It was Northwestern’s lack of opportunity for women wrestlers.

That changed on Jan. 30, when Northwestern’s Student Organizations and Activities Committee approved women’s wrestling as a club sport — opening the door for Becerra and other athletes to pursue a sport that once seemed out of reach. The move came a year after the NCAA’s historic decision to recognize women’s wrestling as its 91st championship sport and months after head coach Marisol Nugent began working to establish a women’s wrestling club at Northwestern. The University of Iowa stands alone in championing a Division I women’s wrestling team in the Big Ten Conference. 

Nugent – a six-time All-American and the first female to compete for the Atlantic Coast Conference under the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – balanced her first-year coursework at the Pritzker School of Law with seizing the chance to coach female athletes to compete at the highest collegiate level. 

“We have this opportunity to right some wrongs in the wrestling community in which a lot of girls have been forced to choose between their academics and their athletics,” Nugent said.

She launched the Northwestern University Women’s Wrestling Club last summer, but without official club status, the team couldn’t fundraise, receive donations, formally recruit or even practice in Northwestern facilities. Instead, the club relied on the generosity of local high schools, clubs and organizations. Evanston Township High School offered practice mat space, allowing the Wildcat women to train two or three times a week since August 2025.

Nugent takes a 45-minute shuttle to Evanston from downtown Chicago, picks up her car from her sister’s place and drives many of her members to and from practices. “My mindset on it is to get my foot in the door and keep it open for them…just so they know that someone is advocating for them behind closed doors, someone’s looking out for them and trying to get them resources they otherwise wouldn’t have,” she said.

Northwestern’s now club joins institutions like Princeton, Brown, Harvard and Columbia, signaling the sport’s growing foothold among top campuses.

Participation in girls’ wrestling is “skyrocketing” across the state, said Sam Knox, assistant executive director of the Illinois High School Association.

“When people ask me, ‘What are your two fastest-growing sports?’ right now, it’s easy,” he said. “It’s girls’ wrestling and girls’ flag football.”

Girls’ wrestling participation has tripled in just three years – rising from 517 competitors in the IHSA’s first sectionals in 2022 to 1,758 regional competitors in 2024–25. Knox said he expects numbers to be even higher this year.  

Sometimes all it takes is a couple students, Knox said, to prompt a school to establish a girls’ wrestling program. Becerra was one of five girls to establish a girls’ wrestling program in her high school, becoming the last group of girls to compete with boys and even wear men’s singlets. For Becerra, carving out space where none existed has always been part of the fight. 

“I dedicated time outside of school to it, which is the only sport I’ve done that for,” she said. Even while wrestling with her parents’ disapproval, she kept showing up in secret — until her mom agreed to let her continue two weeks later. The Aurora, Illinois native went 0-10 her first year, saying competing in the male division might explain her record. By her senior year, Becerra finished second in the girls’ conference after recovering from her season-ending collarbone injury in her sophomore year.

She said she was convinced her senior year would be the last time she hit the mat. Becerra attended a wrestling clinic at her high school after graduation, where her coach, who had previously competed with Nugent, put them in touch. Two weeks later, she received an email: she was in.

Alongside her, McCormick first‑year Victoria Jewell was heartbroken by the thought of leaving wrestling behind after placing second at the Wisconsin state championships in high school. But she still chose Northwestern, citing its strong academics and financial aid package.

Club wrestling practices helped her find her footing at Northwestern, Jewell said. “The first couple of weeks of being on campus was really hard, except for when I got to wrestling practice,” she said. “Every time we have practice, college feels so much better.” 

Now, they are navigating a new challenge: the shift from folkstyle to freestyle wrestling. Nugent says that transition – especially adjusting stances and movement – is a big hurdle. Freestyle wrestling, the international standard for women’s competition, rewards explosive takedowns and exposure moves that flip or turn an opponent, showing their back. Folkstyle, the tradition in U.S. high schools and the men’s collegiate division, emphasizes control, riding time and positional dominance.

Jaimie McNab, senior manager of women’s freestyle, emerging programs and national teams services at USA Wrestling, said women wrestle freestyle because their collegiate programs developed later than men’s. By then, freestyle was already dominant at the grassroots level, making it the logical choice.

Jewell says her technique improved greatly because of Nugent’s coaching and the consistency of having a practice partner in her 165-pound weight class, something she never had in high school.

While the athletes focused on adapting to the sport itself, Nugent faced a different challenge — navigating Northwestern’s compliance system, which governs the laws, regulations and policies on sports. Despite being promised an update on their application status by early last November, the team was told in December a new policy had caused unexpected setbacks. That left the athletes unable to accept donations or practice on University mat space for the entirety of Fall Quarter. 

Nugent spent months since last summer on the phone, trying to figure out how they could make the club possible. She said she hopes to use this opportunity to make the college wrestling experience easier for her athletes. “I see all of my girls as extensions of my little sister,” Nugent said. “It’s easy to kind of run through a wall for them when you have that personal attachment.”

Becerra said she hopes women’s wrestling is a well-established program come her senior year, complete with the benefits like access to the athlete dining hall.

The Division I women’s wrestling programs are going to explode in the next few years, McNab said. She points to the fast pace at which the sport gained NCAA recognition after moving from emerging status. “Our high schools were flooded with these girls who want the opportunity to compete,” she said. “And our colleges were kind of a step behind.”

For wrestlers on emerging teams, that gap translates into real, everyday challenges. Becerra said she isn’t focused on being the top wrestler in the room — she wants to create a supportive team environment and ensure her teammates have what they need, including something as fundamental as access to dining halls. 

Looking ahead, the wrestlers hope to don Northwestern purple as the program continues to grow. Nugent said the team is now focused on preparing for Club Nationals, where they’ll compete in Iowa this March.