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I (Gabby Lord-Klein) started Transition Wrestling in 2019. With the help of a few close friends we operated this site as a lead source of independent journalism in the women’s wrestling community, providing updates, insight and always original content. However, we pressed paused on creating new content after the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in April 2021 to reset and the future of this site is currently TBD. Until then, I love this community and I wish you all the very best. 

In Life Through Sport, 
Gabby Lord-Klein

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Transition Wrestling exists in large part to cover collegiate women’s wrestling news.

Our mission is to strengthen the global position of women through stories of effort, excellence & overcoming adversity — a concept we’re rooted in called transitional excellence.

We envision a future where women and girls see themselves: as they are, where they are, and where they want to be.

In 2020, upwards of 80 collegiate programs will offer women scholarships. Plus, nearly 30 states have sanctioned girls wrestling, added a girls division or backed a state tournament at the interscholastic level. Statistics from the 2019 women’s collegiate national tournaments suggests that states with sanctioned girls wrestling provide more women an opportunity to leverage higher education as a means to achieve relative social and economic success than states without sanctioned wrestling.

• Collegiate women have earned the right for focused coverage. We aim to provide tournament coverage, series, interviews and other extended content.
• Media coverage at the collegiate level exposes girl wrestlers (and soon-to-be girl wrestlers) to the superstar role models they can look up to in college. We’ll aim to provide female wrestlers stories of women they can identify with.
• Collegiate women’s wrestling is a prep platform for future Team USA representatives. Not all of the leaders in our sport will go on to wrestle for Team USA. We aim to provide wholesome narratives that show the importance of the leaders that push and shape the women who represent us at the highest level. It’s the diverse team dynamics that make a college program uniquely remarkable.

The wrestling community is filled with stories of the sport bringing otherwise unimaginable experiences and opportunities to a widely diverse population. Life is much larger than sport, but sport can be the vehicle that leads us to opportunities. 

Transitional Excellence: Wrestling is a sport built on transitions. Every action creates opportunity for reaction, and every reaction creates opportunity for subsequent action. To build transitional excellence on the mats, coaches and athletes must think openly about how the body flows in conjunction with the opponent. Some actions are immediate, others require instantaneous critical thinking and maneuvers new to the body in a match situation. On the mat transitional excellence requires the athlete to think under conditions of extreme pressure and exhaustion.

Transitional excellence off the mats is an individuals ability to think critically and rationally, to become experts in specific fields with an aptitude for change, to navigate through positive/negative challenges and ambiguity free from paralysis, to assert knowledge confidently, to remain humble and take care of the self first in order to do better for the self and others.