Story by Kaitlyn Schmidt
Video story by Olivia Mundorf
Photography by Andrew Lewis
Bermuda Run, N.C. — The buzz of 192 female high school wrestlers reverberated off the walls of Rise Indoor Sports Complex in Bermuda Run, North Carolina.
Reagan Smith clipped on her headgear and stepped onto the corner of Mat 5. She wore a top knot that hardly tamed her curly red hair, a navy singlet and black shoes with baby blue bottoms that showed when she pinned an opponent.
The state-equivalent championship held in February 2023 put a special amount of pressure on Smith, one of the two representatives from Hickory Ridge High School. Her coach gave Smith a high five and then reared back to smack the right side of her headgear, his customary good luck gesture.
As she assumed her starting position, the weight of Smith’s accomplishment settled in.
Smith has come a long way from being ridiculed as the only girl on the boy’s team in middle school. Her presence on the mat has been a part of the growing popularity — and acceptance — of high school women’s wrestling in North Carolina. When her hand was raised at the end of the match, it wasn’t only an individual victory, but a win for every female wrestler who will succeed her.
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“You’re overweight.”
The words from her pediatrician branded Smith at a young age. Smith struggled with her confidence and making friends, often secluding herself in her room.
“My size, the things I wore, some people just bullied me to bully me,” Smith said. “I would be walking in a class and they would full-on trip me and I’d go face first into the hallway.”
In fifth grade, Smith attended her older brother’s wrestling matches and was awestruck by the atmosphere. The physicality. The no-drama tell-it-like-it-is culture. The control that the dominant grappler possessed.
Smith made a wager with her mom, Ashley.
“I bet you I can wrestle in seventh grade and be the only female,” Smith told her.
At the time, girls rarely wrestled. But for Smith, everything about wrestling appealed to her.
“I was tired of being made fun of,” she said.
When she began going to wrestling practices in seventh grade, her classmates refused to talk to her or even look at her. Parents complained that Smith was taking a spot on the roster.
In one of her first home matches in Harrisburg, N.C., Smith sized up her male opponent in a maroon singlet, desperately wishing for her first pin. Almost unrecognizable in a hairnet, Smith wrestled her way through three periods until she saw her chance: Smith got on top, gained control and pinned him.
She did it.
The crowd at Hickory Ridge Middle erupted in cheers as the referee thrusted Smith’s hand in the air in victory.
Now, how could she continue winning?
Around this time, Cheryl Baynard, the pairing director for North Carolina USA wrestling, was asking similar questions.
How can I help women in the sport? How can we sanction it in high schools?
By that time in 2017, women’s wrestling was a sanctioned high school sport in six states, which allowed women to have their own separate teams as well as state-sponsored regionals and state tournaments. Sanctioning the sport in North Carolina would give female athletes more opportunity and grow wrestling in the state.
“We were constantly compared to men, you know, ‘her takedowns aren’t as smooth as his’ or ‘he pinned faster than she did,’” Baynard said. “It doesn’t have to be that competition; it can be women versus women.”
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Still the only girl during her freshman year at Hickory Ridge High School, Smith still couldn’t find her groove in the sport.
One day, Smith wrote her weight down on a blue sticky note and pasted it on the whiteboard in the women’s locker room for a weigh-in. When she returned, a demeaning comment about her weight was written next to it. Smith erased it and stormed away.
Blake Barber arrived at Hickory Ridge to coach junior varsity in the winter of Smith’s freshman year. Still wrestling all boys and not getting prioritized with the rest of JV, Smith wasn’t seeing improvement in her technique and confidence. Barber took Smith under his wing to build her up as an athlete.
“She wrestled really bad,” Barber said. “She looked scared. She had tears in her eyes.”
Toward the end of that season, Smith’s dad, Ron, had had enough. In the royal blue bleachers of an away meet, he raised his voice after he watched Smith get pinned within seconds.
“I’m tired of watching you lose, I don’t even know why I’m showing up anymore,” Ron said. “Either figure something out, or quit the sport.”
Fighting back tears, Smith kept her head down and walked away. She was determined to make a change.
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Two other female wrestlers joined Smith during her sophomore season and Smith was named captain of the trio. Becoming more comfortable with her own weight class of 185, Smith guided the two through making weight, giving them tips to cut salt out of their diets to decrease water retention and bring Pedialyte to weigh-ins to hydrate.
One Sunday afternoon in the winter of 2020, Smith drove two hours to the Baynard Trained Wrestling Club in Hendersonville to practice with the club team there. When Baynard met Smith, she admired how far Smith had come already.
“A woman who weighs 185 pounds, puts on a singlet and walks out in front of her school to more than likely get beat by a boy has bigger balls than anyone else in that room,” Baynard said.
To push her sanctioning efforts forward, Baynard gathered a task force and formed SanctionNC that year. The team took pictures, created a Facebook site and shared the tag, #SanctionNC, to promote the cause. The team submitted a proposal to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association in October 2021.
It was rejected. Baynard and her task force were stalled for six months to create a new proposal until the legislature’s meeting in April.
Meanwhile, popularity of the sport spread widely enough across North Carolina to allow Smith to sporadically wrestle her first female opponents. For the first time in her wrestling career, Smith boasted a winning record during her junior season.
“It was a big change, I was winning,” Smith said. “I found that against girls, I’m a lot stronger.”
Between the start of Baynard’s sanctioning efforts and the 2022 season, 29 other states sanctioned the sport and a staggering 599 female wrestlers competed that year in North Carolina. To increase the sanctioning buzz at the 2022 Women’s Wrestling Invitational — the state-equivalent for the unsanctioned sport — Baynard designed and sold teal and pink #SanctionNC shirts, the proceeds of which funded scholarships and national team trips.
Not only did Smith wear her shirt there, but she won third place for the 185-pound weight class.
“I’ve been making history all four years, but that was a cool moment,” Smith said. “I was the first ever girl to place for Hickory Ridge.”
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It was April 27, 2022, just after lunch. Cheryl Baynard sat on her living room couch in Hendersonville with her teal and pink shirt on, the smell of vanilla cake wafting through her home. She had been nervously monitoring the N.C. High School Athletic Association’s Twitter all morning, waiting for its decision to surface on the second sanctioning proposal.
Suddenly, the feed refreshed.
#NCHSAABOD Approves sanctioning Women’s Wrestling as a sport offering with a State Championship in 2023-2024. Approved 18-0.
Unanimously.
Through tears, Baynard immediately spread the news on every social platform she could, sharing graphics with the tags #SanctionNC and #35 — after all, North Carolina had just become the 35th state to accomplish the feat.
“We had really won something, like I had beat the biggest boy,” Baynard said. “The toughest boy there was to beat because that’s basically what we’ve had to do. That was the fight.”
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Statewide female participation in the sport increased to 1,024 in the 2022-23 season, a jump of 42%.
Smith finally found a community and sense of self in the sport. During her senior season, Smith was selected as one of the captains of the Hickory Ridge wrestling team, made up of both boys and girls. She boasted a 37-8 record during her last campaign, finishing sixth in the state in the 185-pound women’s class. In bold, proud letters, her state championship shirt read her weight class on the back.
REAGAN 185.
“I’m so comfortable with my weight,” Smith said. “Now, I have so much confidence that people just don’t make fun of me anymore. And that has helped a lot.”
In January, Smith committed to the University of Mount Olive on athletic scholarship to continue her wrestling career. But with graduation in June, she won’t be in the high school circuit to see the legislation go into effect.
“It almost makes you cry, (she’s) not going to see this to the end,” Baynard said. “You paved the way, you were one girl at your school. And next year, your school may have 60 girls come out for wrestling.”
After Smith finishes her collegiate career, she plans to return to Hickory Ridge to coach the new women’s team beside Barber. As for Baynard, she’ll be spearheading the new sanctioning efforts in South Carolina.
#SanctionSC was just created.
“It’s an untapped sport,” Barber said. “Women’s wrestling is gonna be the biggest growing sport in the country in the next three or four years. So I think North Carolina stepping up and doing that is just absolutely awesome.”
