Emmoni Lopez used to take dance lessons while her older brothers wrestled – but it turned out that she liked wrestling better.
Her mom wasn't surprised when Lopez told her she liked wrestling more than dance, and three years after Lopez took up the sport, she enjoys watching her daughter wrestle. Still, when a coach first asked Lopez to join his program, her mom hesitated– she never thought her daughter would want to be a wrestler.
Lopez is among a growing number of girls who are taking up wrestling. Officials with youth organizations in Chicago and the Illinois Kids Wrestling Federation (IKWF) said they've seen the number of girls participating in the sport take off in recent years.
In Lopez's program, about half of the students participating in the organization's free youth wrestling camp this summer are girls, coach Frankie Zepeda said.
Many of the girls Zepeda sees become interested in wrestling through their brothers, he said.
“They probably just learn to … fight back,” he said.
One of those was Yamilet Aguirre. She took up wrestling because she was bored just watching her brother wrestle, she said.
“I can have fun doing it,” she said. “And I can prove girls are just as strong as boys are.”
Though girls have competed on high school wrestling teams in Illinois for years, coaches and female wrestlers said there weren't many participating a decade ago.
“It's really picked up over the last few years,” said Jim Considine, president of the IKWF.
Between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 seasons, the number of girls registered with IKWF grew from 363 to 503, and more of the organization's events are featuring a girls-only division. Girls and boys wrestle together during the season through IKWF, but there's a girls-only championship at the end of the year.
And by adding female wrestling programs, colleges are giving girls and young women another option.
“Female wrestling isn't something unacceptable anymore,” Considine said. “Things have happened so quickly. Ten years ago, you'd never have dreamed of doing this.”
