Girl Scout alum and Olympic wrestler Adeline Gray, now 30, grew up in Lakewood, Colorado, just outside of Denver, and started wrestling when she was 6 years old. The love of the sport runs in her family.

“My mom’s brother was a coach, and my mom grew up around wrestling,” Adeline explains. “My dad wrestled in high school and he really likes it, but my mom loves wrestling. I got hurt once and couldn’t compete, and my mom still went and watched three days of wrestling in a stinky gym.”

Before Adeline, her older female cousin wrestled, too. Still, Adeline remembers that back then, it was standard to be the only girl at a tournament. 

“In high school, I was the only girl on varsity,” she says. “I never wrestled a girl in high school except for when I went to all-girls national tournaments.”

Her maternal uncle was her coach for much of her childhood.

“My uncle said, ‘If you earn your spot on the team and work hard, then you belong and we’ll treat each other like family.’ But there was some ignorance from other coaches and referees,” Adeline recalls. “When Title IX was implemented [years earlier], some wrestling programs got dropped, and for some people that was seen as ‘women’s fault.’ There were a lot of people who were hurt by that, but the anger was directed toward the wrong [people].”

Adeline faced a lot of challenges as she grew up competing.

“In high school, I showed up to a tournament and they asked me to take my nail polish off because they said it could flake off and get in a boy’s eye. The referee pulled me aside and said I had to. But I asked him to show it to me in the rule book and he couldn’t,” she says.

And while most parents and coaches were supportive of her as an athlete, not everyone was comfortable with her presence.

“I did have a few boys where their coaches made it optional for them to wrestle a girl, but I wrestled most of my matches. It did happen about five times a year that people forfeited,” she says.

“One of the biggest issues is lack of leadership in wrestling rooms, where coaches allow children to choose if they want to wrestle another athlete. Male or female, black or white, and —regardless of sexual orientation — we are all athletes when we step on the mat.”

During her formative years as a young athlete, Adeline was also a Girl Scout. She remembers selling cookies with her sisters, three of whom were also Girl Scouts. But the work that went into earning badges made an impact on her ability to take her ambitions more seriously.

“Our troop leader brought women in different fields in to talk to us as part of the badge work,” she says. “It was one of the first times that I remember looking around and realizing there was life as a woman besides being a mother.”

Still, she may not have envisioned her life as a professional wrestler at the time.

Now Adeline—who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in project management, which she funded with wrestling scholarships—also has nine medals. She and her husband live in Colorado Springs, and she trains at the Olympic and Paralympic Training Center along with a full women’s team.

Adeline competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro but did not take home a medal. The story had a different ending this past summer, at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, where she earned a silver.

Today she believes in the work of advocating for separate girls’ teams with female coaches.

“It’s the ‘if you build it, they will come’ philosophy,” Adeline explains. “The opportunities are growing for girls, and I don’t think I started dreaming big enough early enough. I want girls to think about their lives as big and beautiful.”