Scott Swanson
Gracie Olson Stutzman is Sweet Home’s new girls wrestling coach, but she’s definitely no stranger to the sport. She has lived with wrestling for virtually her entire life.
Her older brother Trever started young, followed by her twin brother Kobe, who won a high school state championship.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of wrestling,” said Stutzman, 23. “Our family would be considered a wrestling family because my brothers did it. We spent a lot of time at wrestling tournaments.”
She was a “stats girl” for the wrestling team in high school, and then, as a junior, she decided to try the sport herself. Marissa Kurtz was entering the high school as a freshman after wrestling in junior high and Olson said that made a big difference. She joined the team for the 2015-16 season and kept going.
“Of course, it’s scary if it’s just you, but Marissa was coming up as a freshman.”
They were good for each other on the mat. Sweet Home had had a few girls wrestle over the previous years, but they had had to compete against boys for the most part, as very few girls wrestled in Oregon until about 2015.
Olson ended up taking third in the state championships as a senior, in 2017.
“Gracie and Marissa Kurtz were the original women’s team,” said Head Coach Steve Thorpe, who brought Stutzman on after 15 girls turned out for wrestling in November – there were five last year.
“Gracie wrestled two years in high school and she made the most of it. She’s got a work ethic that’s incredible.”
Olson was a valedictorian for the Class of 2017 and went on to Oregon State University, where she also excelled academically.
“I considered wrestling in college, but I fell in love with OSU and forestry,” she said. “There were not many places where I could have pursued that and wrestled.”
She earned a degree in forestry engineering last June, graduating as the School of Forestry’s Student of the Year, and went to work as a forester for Cascade Timber Consulting, where she’d interned in the summer of 2019.
Meanwhile, girls wrestling was getting legs at Sweet Home, even as the sport also has mushroomed at the college level across the nation. Thorpe said he realized he needed help.
“When we had our big women’s group, for one, that’s a lot for me. I have to split my time and our girls deserve their own coach. As we build women’s wrestling, we want to have a women’s coach.”
Also, he noted, district officials agreed on that.
“It didn’t take much for Gracie to come to my mind, right off the bat.”
Stutzman, now married to Dylan Stutzman, another former Husky wrestler, was at work Monday afternoon when she received a text from Thorpe.
“He said, ‘We have 14 girls. Do you want to come coach?’
“At first I was, ‘No way.’ It had been five years since I’d wrestled and I’d never coached.”
She decided to attend a practice and check it out.
“On Tuesday and Wednesday I went to practice and then I said, ‘OK, this is pretty cool.’ I realized this was the opportunity I’d been praying for. I’d been wanting an opportunity to get involved.”
Thorpe attributes it to the local culture of serving: “It’s just another one of those Sweet Home things, where somebody from this community is giving back.”
Although the girls team is in its infancy, it has senior leadership in Paige Chafin and Kami Hart, who compete at diverse ends of the weight divisions, and both of whom placed third at state last year, in a tournament that was significantly larger and more competitive overall than what Stutzman experienced five years ago.
“Kami and Paige are really great leaders,” Stutzman said. “It definitely helps to have them around, with so many new girls.”
Although the teams practice together, at the same time, the girls have their own mat.
“We just kick the boys off that mat,” Stutzman said. “We all do the same practice, though. We make it clear that we expect the same amount of effort, work ethic and toughness.”
She said the newcomers gained confidence after surviving the team’s outdoor workout in November, which includes exercises such as lifting heavy equipment tires over their heads and carrying them as a group, hoisting and carrying heavy chunks of wood, exercises with heavy chains, tug-of-war drills, wind sprints, pushups and other calisthenics. The mud-covered participants then get dinner at the end of the workout.
“You make it through the outdoor practice at the beginning of the season and a couple of intense practices, you start to figure it out,” Stutzman said, speaking from experience.
Many of the newcomers have had to learn the basics – match etiquette, the rules of the sport.
“There’s a wide range of knowledge and practice that we have to accommodate for,” she said. “A lot of the new girls, we need to focus on getting them to realize they’re capable of more than they think. That’s something all wrestlers need to learn in Sweet Home.”
Her wrestlers are coming along, Stutzman said.
“They are progressing. A couple of the new girls are starting to excel. The rest of them, they’re catching on quickly.”
Her team’s goal? It’s the same as the boys’ is each year: “to place at state,” she said.
The size of the fields and the competition level at girls tournaments has mushroomed as well.
“There are a lot more girls,” Stutzman said. “I was blown away by how many girls were at our tournament in Sweet Home. There were so many.”
As the sport has grown, weight division parameters have changed as well, as have a lot of other things, she noted.
“It’s developing its own style of wrestling, which is distinct from men’s, I think. That will probably continue. I’m still trying to figure it out, because it wasn’t that way when I was wrestling.”
Girls tend to use moves that boys don’t, which “work better on girls,” she said. “Physiologically, I guess.”
Another thing that she sees happening is certain teams are “shaping the sport right now – the way they coach, what they do.”
Thurston and Hood River had larger girls programs when she was wrestling, she noted, which continues, but other schools are closing the gap.
“McKay has a large girls team.”
And now Sweet Home is there as well.
“Gracie has been great for us,” Thorpe said. “The girls like her. She’s learning, but the neat thing about it is she’s been around Sweet Home wrestling, following her brothers, then as stats keeper, than becoming a wrestler and now a coach.
“Any time you can add a quality person to your program like that, it makes things so beneficial to the growth and potential that Sweet Home wrestling has.
“Sweet Home wrestling has never stayed stagnant. It’s always growing.”