Team USA's Skylar Grote opens up on current, future opportunities for women's college wrestling

Skylar Grote comes from a wrestling state: New Jersey. A Blair Academy (N.J.) product and Brock University (Canada) alum, Grote made waves this past April at the US Olympic Trials, going 3-2 and finishing 5th/6th.

But her college experience could’ve been different had their been more Division 1 opportunities in America. Currently, Iowa, Presbyterian College, Sacred Heart and Lindenwood University are the only schools to offer.

Speaking with On3, Grote opened up what her college experience was like and how it’s changed and also not changed with today’s landscape.

“I obviously had goals to go to a really big academic school as well when I was at Blair, but I faced the problem of there weren’t a lot of wrestling schools for women that were D1 or were very strong academically,” Grote said. “And so it was a very difficult process for me to go through to try to decide, you know, where do I go for college?

“Do I kind of put my wrestling career first or do I put my academics first or, you know, do I kind of just sacrifice them both to a degree? And so I decided at the time that my academics were more important.”

As Grote pointed out, some elite female wrestlers have to weigh the decision between academics and pursuing wrestling in full. Ultimately, Grote wanted more hands on experience with wrestling and proper training.

“And so, I told my parents we got to figure out something else,” Grote said. “I need to go somewhere else I need coaches working with me day in and day out, and I needed a team and so I decided to transfer and my dad had a friend that suggested that I look at schools in Canada because they were pretty decent academically. And the wrestling was pretty solid.

“And so we took a trip to Canada, I visited Guelph, and I visited Brock and when I got to Brock I just knew that that was the place that I needed to be. There were World and Olympic medalists in the room. It was just a great environment. And they had a really good business school. And so I just figured that was the place for me to be and I spent three years there. But yeah, definitely a difficult process for me to go through because I felt like I couldn’t win.”

For Grote’s full conversation with On3 on women’s wrestling, CLICK HERE.

So how does the landscape change? Is it money, media exposure, interest? Maybe a little bit of everything? Grote would love to use a magic wand on media exposure to make the sport explode like women’s basketball did with Caitlin Clark in recent years.

Perhaps she is right and it can be done. Only time and effort will tell.