Wednesday March 5th 2025

When I first started wrestling, the landscape was very clear. Wrestling was a “boys sport” and that was that. Likewise, there were “girls sports” as well and that was just fine. These sports were uniquely one gender and there were no mixing at all. At this point in time, the thought of girls and women’s wrestling was not even an afterthought as gender restrictions would not even allow girls to participate. Therefore, in 1991 when girls entered the sport of wrestling in Quebec, it was a bit of a culture shock.

Synchronized swimming is still one of the last “women only sports”

My mother, who had grown to appreciate the sport as I continued my athletic journey, was a witness to some of these initial matches. Her assessment wasn’t positive as she remarked that it wasn’t very technical and actually hard to watch. With that being said, fast-forward to the early two thousands. My mom had just watched the 2008 Olympic Games where Quebec’s Martine Dugrenier was making her Olympic debut. Obviously a lot of time had passed since her watching those first matches at the Quebec provincials and her comments were very positive as she said that it had improved enormously from a technical standpoint and was also more exciting. In that short amount of time, the sport had evolved and things had begun to change. Women were starting to assert themselves in the sport, forever changing the landscape of wrestling.

In 2013, I had one representative from my program who was a boy and an alternate who was a girl

This sentiment reflects where I’m at in my coaching journey as girls become more and more a part of the sport. Don’t get me wrong, wrestling is still a heavily male dominated arena and I don’t think we’ll see true parity for some time. However, the sport is growing, not just around the rest of the country, but in Quebec as well. From my personal perspective, I can see this quite clearly. This is evidenced by the fact that my first set of national champions were all boys and my first athlete to make the Canada Games in 2013 was in fact a boy. However by 2017, that dynamic had shifted and for the 2017 Canada Games, I had two girls and one boy qualify for the games.

A sign of things to come?

In recent years, more of my successes have come with the girls. As any good coach knows, reflection is key and this got me thinking about why this is so and how this changing dynamic affects the modern wrestling world. While I could come up with a lot of hypotheses as to why I think this is changing, here are some of my initial thoughts. Things such as mixed teams, differentiated practice times, travel to competition and accommodations are all things that have changed since girls have entered the sport. This in turn affects the dynamic as well as how a team will continue to function in the future. I could probably mention quite a bit more but I think I’ll focus on the preceding topics for the time being. Some new thoughts on this topic may come up in a future blog.

Mixed Teams

Due to the nature of wrestling being an individual sport, our teams tend to be mixed because we just don’t have the numbers to have an only girls team. Girls wrestling has only been around for a little over thirty years and as a result, some programs haven’t even accepted girls into their programs. Some programs have only recently accommodated girls into the mix within the last couple of years which may have an effect on their team dynamic. If we use the example of Loyola High School in NDG, this is a school that for the longest time, was an all boys school. Their wrestling program as a result, was only composed of boys for the longest time. In 2023, Loyola officially became co-ed, and welcomed its first cohort of girls. Though there hasn’t been many girls that have come to the wrestling team in the two years since Loyola became co-ed, their dynamic will change at one point. Likewise, a program like Selwyn House School in Westmount, which is still all boys, will never have a girls program and thus, their reality won’t change for the the foreseeable future.

Though now co-ed, the Loyola Wrestling Team remains heavily concentrated on the male side

These programs have produced quite a few athletes that have gone on to win medals at the national and international level with the pinnacle being Alex Moore, a member of the 2024 Canadian Olympic Team coming out of the Selwyn House wrestling program. You have to wonder if inserting girls into the mix would have affected the trajectory of their athletes, whether it be in a positive or negative way.

Differentiated practice times

This one is a topic that may divide a lot of people, particularly purists of the sport. Some would argue that the genders need to ne mixed at some levels and some would argue that they need to be separated. In the many training camps that I’ve attended around the world. practice times are heavily regimented, divided between age groups as well as genders. This is due to the larger amount of participants as well as a regimented view that prohibits mixing. This is not the case in Canadian programs as oftentimes, genders and even age are sometimes mixed. This is the reality at most levels and with the exception of a few programs, men and women train together.

However, I’m going to go on a reverse tangent for this particular topic. To be clear, this has been my reality both as an athlete and a coach. This is the way I’ve trained and coached as I believe that having a mixed gender as well as a cross-generational groups can have benefits for all. And yet, sometimes you have to do something that’s out of your norm so in order for your program to grow.

After being displaced from my former program, I needed to rebuild a new program in my new school. To put some context to this, this is year three of my four year build. During my ACD, the emphasis on planning in cycles was quite important, and as result, I try to do things in a four year cycle, to mimic the frequency of both Olympic and Canada Games cycles. Coming out of the Pandemic and trying to instil a wrestling culture in my new school that hadn’t seen one since 1992 was difficult at best. Progress has been there but it’s been slow, particularly on the girls side. I’ve always had at least a couple of girls but there hasn’t been a true buzz like there was at my previous school which had produced champions in the various levels.

Though my previous program produced a lot champions, I never had enough for just a girls practice

This year, no girls signed up for the team and I was resigned to the fact that maybe my new school just wasn’t ready for girls wrestling. It was on a suggestion from another coach that maybe I try and run a girls only practice. At first, I was sceptical as this is counter-intuitive to what I would always do. It would also divide my resources and I also didn’t know how many people I would get. Necessity and practicality would suggest that this wouldn’t work. Nevertheless, I bit the bullet and put out the announcement for an only girls practice. At most, I was expecting four girls to show up, but at the first meeting, twelve girls signed up and nine showed up for the first practice! They were enthusiastic and eager to learn so what more could you ask for? To add to the developmental aspect of this, they were all in either grade seven or eight, giving me a base to build on for the future should they decide to stay. This may cause me to rethink my strategies concerning differentiated practices for the future.

For the first time in my coaching career, I’ve started to run a Girls Only practice

Travel and accommodations

How things have changed. Travelling to tournaments when I was an athlete was much simpler. We found out how many athletes were going, made the reservation for the hotels and left for the tournament, simple as that. In the last decade, these simple things have changed. With certain issues arising, particularly some unsavoury conduct concerning young girls and a doctor in the U.S. gymnastics federation, the trust that had been established between coaches and athletes had been irrevocably changed. Laws for the interactions with girl athletes had been put in place, just as much for the protection of the athletes as well as the coach.

With girls coming into the sport, wrestling had to follow suit. Accommodations were the obvious thing that needed to be changed as boys and girls could not be expected to share a hotel room. Travel itself also changed as now you had to have a female coach and chaperone if there were girls that were coming to the tournament. While this is good in theory, in practice it’s not always possible.

As an amateur sport, we don’t always have the budget to be able to send extra people. To add to this, there aren’t that many women coaches in the province of Quebec, which adds to that problem. To follow the letter of the law in ideal world would be optimal. From a practical standpoint this doesn’t always work as we don’t always have a female coach that’s able to travel to the various tournaments. This problem can be mitigated with a female parent or chaperone, but again, this doesn’t always work.

My trip to the Cadet Pan Ams opened my eyes to how we need to start making travel accommodations

I was reminded of this reality when I had to travel to the Cadet Pan Championships last year. Since my only athlete was a girl, and we were the only athlete and coach coming from Quebec, this presented a problem as regulations stated that either her guardians or a female chaperone had to accompany us since I was a male coach. This would problematic as her guardians couldn’t go. However, it’s instances like this where an exception to the rule can be made. Being the only people coming from Quebec and the unavailability of any female coach or chaperone, we were given a pass this time. I remember when things were simpler and we didn’t always have to be this careful. Yet another example of the changing reality in the modern coaching world and I for one, am for it if it means that our younger athletes will be protected.

If truth be told, change is inevitable. As wrestlers, we are often stubborn and resistant to change. However, I believe that as long as our core beliefs and values aren’t compromised, and that we keep our standards high, then everything else is ultimately negotiable.