Terry Steiner works at breaking down barriers as USA Wrestling’s national women’s coach
MOLLY BLUE
FOREST GROVE — Wrestling rooms are sweltering, the hotter the better. The walls are padded, and mats line the floor.
Typically, they are places where boys and men test their mettle, training to last six minutes in one of the most intense competitions in sports.
The wrestling room at Pacific University is typical, with the heat, the pads and the mats. Sunday, it was filled with 20 athletes, turned out in T-shirts and shorts or sweat pants. But as Terry Steiner, a coach of USA Wrestling’s national team, drilled the wrestlers, there was a difference.
These were women going through the grueling drills.
Steiner, 36, coaches wrestling, preaches discipline and teaches lessons about life on the mat and beyond — for women.
The former All-American and NCAA champion from the University of Iowa grew up in Bismarck, N.D., forging his career in the sport during the late 1980s and early 1990s when there weren’t any girls in the wrestling room.
The idea of girls wanting to wrestle remains foreign to many. Yet Steiner shifted his way of thinking and in 2002 became USA Wrestling’s first national women’s team coach.
“Five years ago, I can’t say I agreed with women’s wrestling, “Steiner said. “If you ask coaches why they coach, they say they love the sport, what it teaches. If that’s true, why limit it? Let everybody have an opportunity to learn.”
Steiner, who had been an assistant at the University of Wisconsin and Oregon State, was looking for a head coaching job — with a men’s program — when he was approached about the women’s national coaching position after women’s wrestling was added to the Summer Olympics program in 2001.
Had it been a men’s job, he would have jumped at it. Because it was a women’s job, he talked to his twin brother, Troy, also a wrestling coach, and sought out his former coach at Iowa, the legendary Dan Gable.
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