The Chronicle of Higher Education

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O`aV]dbV 8^in Jc^kZgh^in has a long history as an educator of beauty queens. Twenty-six of its students have captured the Miss Oklahoma banner, and three of those have gone on to be crowned Miss America. Larger-than-life bronze statues of them stand in a fountain at the entrance to the university.

But a mile from there, just off the campus, 20 other young women practice a talent that’s never been on display in a Miss America pageant. They sweat and swear in shorts and T-shirts as they drill their takedowns on a blue-and-white wrestling mat. “Watch out!” one of them warns a visitor who is standing next to a plastic container during practice. “That’s the spit can.”

The female wrestling team is brand-new this year at Oklahoma City, one of only six American college teams for women. But the sport’s visibility has been on the rise since 2004, when female freestyle wrestling became an Olympic event.

Archie Randall, who is 56 and stout, with a graying buzz cut, was hired to start a men’s wrestling team here in 2006. He was the winningest high-school coach in the history of Oklahoma, a state where wrestling is king. He knew that 6,500 young women wrestle in high schools nationwide, most of them against boys on predominantly male teams, and he wanted to give some of the best competitors another opportunity to wrestle in college. But he knew that the way to sell a new team was to talk about money. “I can get you 30 girls, and you’re gonna get a half a million dollars” in tuition, he told Oklahoma City’s athletic director, James Abbott.

Mr. Abbott has taken some ribbing since he signed off on the women’s team: “I’ve had a few folks saying, Is it going to be mud wrestling?” But after watching a few matches, he’s hooked. “They are no different than soccer players, rowers, baseball players, or any other athlete,” he says. “They are just as serious and work extraordinarily hard.”

When Mr. Randall started the women’s program, last summer, he signed up 33 young women in six weeks. The university gives the team eight scholarships, for a total of $214,320 a year, the same as for the men’s team. This season his wrestlers, the Stars, beat the top-ranked women’s program, at the University of the Cumberlands, in Kentucky, although Cumberlands beat the Stars at two other matches. The Stars have also competed in California, Missouri, Arizona, and Michigan. And Mr. Randall played host last month to one of the largest tournaments ever for female wrestlers, drawing nearly 400 girls, from elementary school through college, to Oklahoma City’s campus.

As his team’s first season winds to a close, Mr. Randall is down to just 20 young women. Some left because the practice schedule was too hard. “I don’t care what time of the month it is,” he tells them, “you still have to practice, and you have to lift” weights.

What Mr. Randall has learned, though, is that the young women can be just as tough as the men. “They kick and cuss,” he says, “same as the boys.”

The male and female wrestlers share a cramped and dank practice facility off-campus, in what was once a church. The makeshift locker rooms have wooden cubbyholes, and a stair machine and a treadmill sit in a small entryway, where the wrestlers work off last-minute ounces before weigh-ins.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MIKE SIMONS FOR THE CHRONICLE

Oklahoma City U.’s Briana Conway (above, in red) and Emma Mercer (left, in red) compete against wrestlers from the U.S. Olympic Education Center, which is at Northern Michigan U.

Winding through the narrow hallway that connects the locker rooms and the practice room, it’s not unusual to see a guy standing naked on a scale. Maybe because they are always weighing themselves, it isn’t strange for wrestlers to strip down almost anywhere.

Mr. Randall was surprised that female wrestlers were just as immodest as the men. “I am always shouting: ‘Girls, get your clothes on!’” he says.

Some of the female wrestlers here date guys on the men’s team. And some of the young women, says Mr. Randall, date one another. The rules are the same for both kinds of relationships: “No holding hands, no affection in the practice room or at any public places.”

Mr. Randall knows some people believe there is no place for women in the rough sport of wrestling. But he wants to show that his competitors can be feminine and be wrestlers at the same time. That’s why he insists that they be neat and well groomed, and that they fix their hair and paint their nails before each meet. None of the young women seem to mind. When one of them walks by his office before practice one day, he yells: “Erica, what are we when we’re off the mat?” “Ladies,” answers Erica Lee Torres, a Californian who is wearing a bright-red hoodie, red suede boots, and black nail polish.

Ms. Torres is a freshman in the 112-pound weight class. She started wrestling in the fourth grade and was the only girl on her high-school team. She was a tomboy who played football with the boys at recess. This is the first time in her life that she has been surrounded by women. “The girls here have shown me ‘girl world,’ ” she says. “They’ve been teaching me about hair and makeup. I was like, So, this is what girls are like.”

Some of the young women here were passed over for varsity spots in high school even though they could beat male wrestlers. And male competitors usually weren’t glad to see them on the mat. Some boys refused to wrestle the girls, preferring to lose by forfeit. “I’ve heard stuff like, ‘I don’t know where to grab her,’ and ‘It’s against my religion to wrestle a girl,’ ” says Sheila McCabe, a 138-pounder. Other guys, she says, “would pull our hair, punch us, and run us into the ground.”

The young women here who were used to wrestling boys in high school have had to adjust their style. Boys typically dominate girls in strength but are much less flexible and not always as quick. Nicole Woody, a 105-pound freshman, was used to waiting for boys to shoot in to grab her legs and then using her flexibility to sprawl away from a takedown. “I counter, I wait,” she says. “But girls don’t ever take a shot, so my style clashes with what girls do.” She has a 10-8 record here.

At nearly 25 years old, Ashley Sword is the team’s most experienced wrestler and an Olympic hopeful. She spent five years after high school wrestling at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, in Colorado Springs. She’s the only woman here with cauliflower ear, a condition in which the ear has been banged and twisted so much that it fills with fluid. Ms. Sword has also had three knee surgeries, fractured a vertebra, torn ligaments in both elbows, and broken her nose three times— the last time so badly that it pushed her front teeth back.