INDIANAPOLIS — Wednesday is National Girls and Women in Sports Day, a moment to reflect on how far women’s athletics have come.
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Ella Gahl is a freshman wrestler at Manchester University.
"It's given me a lot of confidence over the years," she said.
She started wrestling in first grade and watched opportunities for girls steadily expand.
“When I started, I had to wrestle boys. I was the only girl in the room,” Gahl said. “Then I got into my sophomore year of high school, and that was the first time I truly wrestled girls.”
In high school, Gahl competed in the first Indiana High School Athletic Association girls wrestling state championship. Now, she is preparing to be part of another milestone, the inaugural NCAA Women’s Wrestling Championship. Division III will add its own championship in 2028.
“It’s an honor to get to be a part of both,” Gahl said.
Gretchen Miron, director of education and external engagement at the NCAA, said the championship represents a major step forward for student-athletes.
“It’s the first time that a lot of these wrestling student-athletes will have the opportunity to compete for an NCAA championship, which many of our other student-athletes talk about as the pinnacle of their athletic opportunity,” Miron said.
Wrestling is not the only sport seeing expansion. The NCAA will also hold new women’s championships in acrobatics and tumbling, stunt and Division II bowling.
“There’s a relatively new media rights deal that the NCAA has, so we're doing more storytelling. We're trying to elevate these stories so that people can see these student-athletes and kind of fall in love with them and want to continue to watch along their journey,” she said. “There's more scholarships than ever being awarded at member schools for female student-athletes, which is huge.”
The inaugural NCAA wrestling championship season will take place March 6 and 7 in Coralville, Iowa
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