Women’s wrestling finding success in second year

By MAYAN PAZ

Tiger Media Network

Wrestling is one of the most ancient sports in the world, and the NCAA has featured wrestling competitions since 1911. While wrestling may have once considered a traditional male sport, women’s wrestling has developed rapidly in recent decades and was first introduced into the Olympic Games in 2004. The NCAA took more time to include the sport, but it will be an official NCAA Championship event in 2026. 

At FHSU, this is the second year with a women’s wrestling program, but they have only started competing officially in the past year. Alijah Jeffery was hired in 2023 to develop and build the program at FHSU. Jeffery wrestled at Northern Illinois University and coached women’s wrestling teams at Indian Hills CC and Chadron State before being hired at Fort Hays. 

He talked about his recruiting philosophy and the challenges it takes to build a new program. Having coached women’s wrestling at the college level for six years, Jeffery said he has built connections and seen high-level women’s wrestlers, which he and his staff use to help find future Tigers.  

“We’ve gone through this process by finding the best wrestlers and wrestlers with great character and academic success just by building the right culture. It takes all of those things and encompasses a full student-athlete versus just wrestling success,” Jeffery said. “So we always look at what their character is, how they do academically, and how they do athletically as well when we recruit wrestlers.”

While this is the second year of its existence, the FHSU women’s wrestling team competed last year unattached as they went through the process of becoming an official university sport. This included only wrestling at opens, with no duals or post-season championships on the schedule. However, this year, the team can fully compete for FHSU. Jeffery used last year and this season together to help build the program and the culture.  

“This year, finally, we are having our full team get a real season and compete in dual meets together. It’s been good to see the growth of our team as we’ve just consistently gotten better,” he said. “And having little successes here and there, and having wrestlers that just continuously improving and climbing the national rankings, it’s been fun to be a part of.”

The Tigers are already nationally ranked No. 20 in the National Wrestling Coaches Association team tournament ranking and No. 8 in their region. Jeffery also said FHSU is No. 11 in the dual tournament rankings. 

“We were able to crack the rankings in both tournament and dual, which was a success for us. I still think that our team has a lot of room for growth,” he said. “We’re young, and we’re just continuing to develop and get better, but it has been a great season so far. We’ve had little successes here and there, and we just want to continue to build and hopefully peak at the right time for the national tournament.”

The team is composed of almost entirely freshmen and sophomores and is developing together into the professional lives of collegiate student-athletes. Isabella Renfro, from Seneca, Mo., is one of the best wrestlers on the team this season, as she competes in the 180 lbs category. 

Renfro wrestled from a young age and, based on some positive phone calls with Jeffery, decided to come to Hays and join the newly formed program. She said the team environment, despite being young and inexperienced, is one of the best features of her experience as a Tiger.

“I really like the team environment,” she said. “We have our moments where we bicker, and we fight, and we don’t get along, but it’s more like a familial bond, where it’s like we’re all family, and at the end of the day, we all still care about each other, no matter what obstacles we face or the beef we have with each other, we still all would be willing to take a bullet for each other.” 

There are many differences between high school wrestling and collegiate wrestling. For Renfro and the rest of the young team, some challenges are bigger than others, but they try to identify all of them and understand how to overcome them. 

“Collegiate wrestling is just a different level of intensity. Every match is going to be difficult, and every match is going to come down to a few scores,” she said. “So it’s different from high school, where a lot of our wrestlers dominated in almost every match, and would get only a couple matches where they would really be pushed a year, whereas, in college, every match is very difficult, so fine-tuning those little details to make sure that they have an advantage in the at the highest level collegiate is the biggest thing.”

Renfro also said the team spends time on technicalities and cleaning up their mistakes to make sure they are sharp and ready to go for the full collegiate season, which she notes is significantly longer than the high school season. 

The team now prepares for the last stage of the season, where they will compete in the regional tournament in Denton, Texas on February 22. Individuals who finish in the top four in the region will qualify to compete in the national championship tournament in Iowa in early March. Jeffery hopes some athletes will achieve the qualifying mark but also tries not to be too specific with his expectations and demands. 

“I like to take things one step at a time, and a quote that I really like is just ‘get 1% better every day’ because no matter what you do, you know it’s okay to have setbacks,” he said. “You want to work just to be the best version of yourself that you can be. And I’ve heard another quote, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying a brick every hour.’ And that’s something that I really like, just because that’s how wrestling works. You don’t have to be moving leaps and bounds with your accomplishments, but just working to accomplish the next step, to put yourself one step higher than you were the day before.”