“By choosing wrestling, I choose to live a life without any regrets, where I always try what piques my interest, even if I’m not entirely sure what I want to get out of the experience,” Hannah Bryson says.

Sports

Meet BU’s Female Wrestling Star

Hannah Bryson is part of one of the country’s fastest growing sports for women

It takes Hannah Bryson only a few seconds to dominate an opponent on the wrestling mat. She pins her opponent with her left arm across their back, her elbow by their ear, and chest on chest, immobilizing them. Then she grins.

Bryson (CAS’28) is carving her own path in women’s wrestling. The first—and only—female wrestler at nearby Wilmington High School, she earned third place at the state level in the 126-pound weight class in 2023, then went on to claim first in the state and second in New England in 2024. That same year, she also triumphed with a 4-2 victory at nationals. 

But despite women’s wrestling being one of the fastest-growing sports at both the high school and the college level, Bryson faced an obstacle here at BU: the University doesn’t have a wrestling program (a men’s team disbanded in 2014). BU is not unique—women’s wrestling became an official NCAA championship sport only this academic year, and is not as common as men’s programs. So instead, Bryson practices with the BU Jiu-Jitsu club team and across the river with MIT’s wrestling club team.

While proud of her medals, Bryson says they aren’t the only thing driving her. Wrestling has been monumental in her personal development, she says, teaching her valuable life skills that extend far beyond the mat.

“Wrestling has taught me that I will never know the extent of what I am capable of until I try it,” she says. “By choosing wrestling, I choose to live a life without any regrets, where I always try what piques my interest, even if I’m not entirely sure what I want to get out of the experience.”

A trailblazer since childhood

Bryson’s journey began at age nine when she joined an adult Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class at the studio of a friend of her dad’s, Ironclad Martial Arts in Wilmington, Mass. “I thought it looked fun and asked to join,” she says. “There weren’t any other kids enrolled, but they found a way to get me in, and I loved it.” 

In high school, she was a multisport athlete. In addition to wrestling, she captained the cross-country team and earned a black belt in Krav Maga, a close-combat self-defense technique developed in the Israeli military. She was drawn to individual sports because she felt it gave her direct control over her performance.

“I liked the team aspect, but I wanted to be responsible for whether I won or lost,” Bryson says. “Wrestling is a good way to have a team and have support, but it’s still an individual sport. You have to think a lot in wrestling. So it’s a lot of learning and applying that learning. Not only is it good athletically, it’s good mentally.”

She didn’t start wrestling until her high school junior year, mainly because there were no girls on the team. But with her martial arts background, she decided to give it a try and picked it up quickly. She became the first female wrestler in Wilmington.

Asked what it was like to be the first, and only, girl on the team, Bryson shrugs. “I didn’t really think much of it, because I’d been doing jiu-jitsu for so long. And I was usually the only girl there, usually the only kid as well. So I was kind of used to being the only one.”

The boys on the team were initially hesitant to work with her, but changed their minds once they saw how seriously she competed. “When they realized I wasn’t going to get upset if they took me down, they just treated me as a member of the team,” she says. She made the varsity lineup as a junior, mostly competing against boys, although her coaches found a few girls’ tournaments for her to compete in. 

By the end of high school, Bryson had earned multiple accolades, including being named a Boston Herald All-Scholastic Wrestler, Division III State Champion, Massachusetts All-State Champion, and a New England Tournament Silver Medalist.

At BU, Bryson is majoring in English, and she’s joining ROTC next year and plans to become a chaplain. Serendipitously, one of her jiu-jitsu coaches, Brad Lewis (CAS’14), had been a member of the BU wrestling team and is now a professional wrestler. Bryson’s goa:l starting a wrestling team on campus before she graduates. 

Training the next generation

In high school, Bryson led a girls’ wrestling workshop in order to achieve her Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest and most difficult award a Girl Scout can earn. Seeking to address the lack of girls participating in the sport, she hoped that by encouraging younger girls to engage, she might lessen the sport’s prevalent gender gap. She continues coaching at youth camps and clinics, working part-time as a coach for a kids’ wrestling team in Medford through the city’s recreation department.

Hannah Bryson coaches kids at camps and at the Medford Recreation Center. Top left photo courtesy of Hannah Bryson, additional photos by Jackie Ricciardi

Bryson points out that wrestling is still a male-dominated sport, with many joining the sport as little kids. The same recruiting doesn’t happen for girls, which means that if they try to join the sport later, they’re at even more of a disadvantage—and might feel discouraged from pursuing it at all. If the sport’s leaders encouraged young girls to join, she says, the gender divide would start to disappear. 

Despite being somewhat of a niche, wrestling is accessible, offers a weight class for every body type, and needs relatively little equipment. Yet without a family member or friend versed in the sport, many girls never have the opportunity to try it. And Bryson considers that unfortunate.

She says wrestling has given her valuable life skills, including emotional regulation, stress management, social and leadership development, healthy eating, and boundary-setting. Now she wants to pass that message on to others.

“I think a lot of girls would be interested in the sport, but they don’t realize it’s an option,” she says. “I want to get as many girls on the mat as I can and keep them interested.”