By Casey Jarmes | The News-Review
CEDER RAPIDS – On July 30, Coe College announced the founding of a new NCAA women’s wrestling program, to be headed by Sigourney native Kaleb Reeves. “It’s been a long time coming,” said Reeves. “I’ve known for a couple months now, but they were waiting for the right time to launch it…We’ve always kinda had the idea of creating a women’s program, it was more about timing. There’s been a recent, pretty large uptick in terms of natural and national attention that’s going into women’s wrestling, with all of these schools sanctioning state tournaments and national tournaments for women getting increasingly popular. Coe felt like it was the right time to add a program to give women in college the opportunity to be able to compete in an awesome sport like the sport of wrestling. It’s pretty crazy, not a lot of people think about the world level stage. A lot of our women are performing really, really well on the world stage, and this is women who grew up without the sanctioning of a tournament or a normal high school season. So, with that kind of development, I think as a country we’ll be able to put women increasingly more on the world map as well.”
The first official NCAA Women’s Wrestling Championship is set for 2026. The Coe team is set to begin competing the following 2026/2027 season. Reeves stated that his goal was to have a full team recruited by October of next year.
“The goal is to be able to provide women the opportunity on all levels,” said Reeves. “You know, women who are just wanting to wrestle in college, and then, eventually, the goal is to be able to provide opportunities to women that are willing to continue and potentially do world level competitions as well.”
As a Sigourney student, Reeves was a four-time state qualifier and three-time state place winner. During his five years at Coe, Reeves had an overall 103-22 record and earned NCAA All-American Heavyweight status three times. He was a career falls leader, with 87 career falls, setting the school’s single-season record with 27 in 2021/2022. After graduating in 2023, he began working in the Coe admissions office and volunteering as an assistant wrestling coach.
“When I did a lot of my training at the senior level, going to the World Championships in 2023 in Albania, when I was training at the Olympic Training Center, the women wrestlers were down there as well,” said Reeves. “And, obviously, our area is kind of a local hotbed for women that have exceeded on the women’s wrestling level. Reanah Utterback is a very strong standout from Sigourney, obviously. But then, even going back a couple years, Megan Black from Eddyville was a really, really strong female wrestler as well. So I’ve kind of grown up around women’s wrestling. It wasn’t something I gravitated towards at first, but as I started going through my career here and finishing up my career as an athlete, I realized how much attention and how much real growth that women’s wrestling has a chance to do.”
Reeves noted that the biggest hurdle for female wrestlers is the fact that, while male wrestlers wrestle Folkstyle in both high school and college, female wrestlers wrestle Folkstyle in high school then have to switch to Freestyle in college. He stated that Coe had great athletic facilities and was ready for women to begin wrestling.
“It’s going to be a challenge, being a first year program and not having any real accolades for our program yet, versus other programs that have been competing for a while and have those kind of things. But, the biggest thing that I’ve thought about internally as I go to recruit is, you know, I’m personally not a person who likes to sit in the mediocrity. I don’t want to just kind of build this program through years. My goal is to have this program, within the first year, really kicking off and going and competing at a high level,” concluded Reeves.
