Erin Golston comes from a wrestling family, but for a young girl growing up in the 80s, wrestling wasn’t a first option.
Yet that changed after her father, who wrestled in high school in Chicago and in college at Illinois State, enrolled her older brother in the sport.
Erin, who was 5 at the time, watched her brother from the sidelines not as a disinterested spectator, but as a future competitor. A year later, she told her father that she wanted to wrestle too.
So at the age of 6, Erin Golston began her career on the mat.
In her first two years in the sport, Erin, who was the only girl on her team, went 36-2, an amazing start that she attributes to her father, who was also her coach.
“I definitely picked it up quickly,” she told me in our interview. “And it did help that my dad was the coach of the beginner and intermediate group because I was the only girl on the team…I think if I walked in any other room without my Dad I don’t think it would have been as comfortable. But since he had the wrestling background, and he was there every second of my first year wrestling, I think I was able to pick it up quite quickly.”
And with wrestling in her blood, she exceled quickly.
It was a stark contrast from playing soccer, which she found little interest in.
Wrestling made her more focused as she quickly discovered its purpose and structure.
“I just knew ‘alright, just get them to their back and I win.’”
Simple enough, but to do that, you need more than recognition, and that’s where the practice, dedication, hard work, sacrifice and learning came in to the picture.
For young girls in the sport at that time, wrestling came with limitations as it wasn’t an NCAA championship sport, so building a long career in the sport came with tempered expectations.
But Erin was different.
Not only was the sport in her blood, but from an early age, she knew where she wanted to go.
The Olympics.
“In kindergarten, my teacher introduced us to what the Olympics were and I was like ‘I want to do this.’”
So her parents began taking her to camps, including at the University of Iowa, a school known for producing some of the best collegiate wrestlers in history.
For them, it wasn’t about their daughter being a girl who was going to wrestle.
It was “You’re going to wrestle.”
And that’s just what she did.
But despite her success and love for the sport, some remained skeptical.
“What? Really? I didn’t know girls wrestle.”
“Is that your boyfriend’s sweatshirt?”
Ignorance can be alarming, furstrating, humorous or, for athletes, motivation.
Talking to Erin, it was easy to see it was the latter.
Sacrifice, Doubt and Rediscovery
When she was a sophomore in high school, Erin moved by herself from Illinois to Marquette, Michigan to train at the Olympic training center.
A young, 15-year-old Black girl moving up to a majority white town to wrestle. That couldn’t have been easy.
Her family was almost 10 hours away, she was the youngest wrestler in the program and she was surrounded by very few who looked like her.
That takes confidence, passion and a deep belief in yourself, especially at such a young age. And as impressive as that is, and as good as the overall experience was, her face told me that that there were painful moments was well.
But she persevered.
