Kelsey Campbell delivers to earn trip to Olympics
By Jackie Branca
The clock hadn’t even reached zero when Kelsey Campbell dropped to her knees.
She released the pent-up emotion that had been building through the last match, through that last week, building for near- ly a decade. She began sobbing on the mat, tears of joy. At 26, Campbell had just made the U.S. Olympic Team at 55 kg/121 lbs. in women’s freestyle wrestling.
Unlike many young wrestlers, Kelsey Campbell, a Milwaukie, Ore. native, hadn’t expected to one day become an Olympian. Campbell has worked hard and been in the right place at the right time and taken advantage of those opportunities for the majority of her wrestling career. Campbell took advantage of one of those opportunities as a junior in high school when one of her friends on the wrestling team wagered she couldn’t han- dle two weeks with the wrestling squad.
“I told him I could definitely handle it,” Campbell said. “Once word spread around, and this kind of shows you the type of per- son I am, once people knew what I was going to do I thought, now I have to do it.” The next year, as a senior, Campbell went out for the wrestling team from the start. After a little misunderstanding on the first day of practice in which Campbell’s coach thought she was the team manager and handed her a mop, Campbell not only proved her friend wrong but she made believers of every- one along the way to being an Olympian almost a decade later. “I’m not even sure what came of the bet or what I got out of it,” Campbell said. “Except maybe nine years of making weight and giving my life to this sport.”
Campbell was a multi-sport athlete in high school, also com- peting in cross country, track and field, soccer and basketball. But it was wrestling that allured her.
“I don’t really know what I was thinking, honestly,” Campbell said about her decision to pick up wrestling without ever having tried the sport prior to her senior year. “It was time to move on (from basketball), but I really think I was not in my right mind when I went out for wrestling. I don’t know what I was doing. I could barely tie my wrestling shoes.” After high school, Campbell thought she was done with the sport. Until again she was presented with the idea of trying out for a college wrestling team. And like in high school, she didn’t think much of the suggestion but figured she would give it a try. Although Campbell originally went to Arizona to do ministry work and try to spearhead the campus ministry at Arizona State University, she suddenly found herself in the men’s wrestling room.
“It was another thing that just kind of happened,” Campbell said. “I wasn’t like, ‘Oh I’m going to wrestle for ASU one day.’ Never in a million years did I think that. When I was first there in 2006-07, I was part of an MMA club on campus and there was a guy, Tracy Greiff, that saw me and said I should try out for the ASU team. All I could think was this guy is crazy.” At first, Campbell’s membership on the men’s wrestling team was not received well. But Campbell knew the only way to gath-
32 USA Wrestler
Kelsey Campbell (in red) defeated Helen Maroulis to earn a trip to the Olympic Games. Brooke Zumas photo.
er supporters was to give them a reason to support her through hard work and determination. “At first, it was tough. I think as a guy, when you join a Division I wrestling program you don’t ever expect to walk in a room and see a girl. It’s the last think you’d expect,” Campbell said. “But I think gradually, if you work hard enough and do the right things, you win people over.”
Although she never competed collegiately against the men in competition, Campbell certainly won over her early skeptics along the way at ASU. She won two National Collegiate Women’s wrestling championships and the 2009 U.S. Open. Some of her biggest supporters on her journey to the Olympics have been her college coaches and teammates. With her success at Arizona State, and winning at the national
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