Iowa wrestling coach is making history
When Clarissa Chun perched on the local pool’s starting blocks – readying for a race in the first sport to catch her heart, swimming – she was easily a foot shorter than the other girls on the line. But the 4-foot-11 athletic dynamo told herself height was no matter; she’d swim harder and faster than them all.
“I had the mentality of I don’t care if they’re taller, I’ll do 10 strokes to their one,” she says.
Same in the judo dojo, where the boys never held back from full contact. As a child, Chun prided herself in making up any perceived lack in pure effort.
“I was super competitive,” she says. Spunky, she adds with a smile. “I just had this attitude, like, I could do anything.”
By the end of her sophomore year, when Chun finally conceded her frame was a disadvantage in the upper echelons of swimming, the high school wrestling coach cornered her with an interesting offer. She’d be one of just two women on the team, but he saw how her competitive nature would fuel the physicality needed for wrestling. He saw how she could be great. Join? he suggested.
Since then, Chun’s spent most of her life in the spotlight, an elite wrestler in a 30-foot circle, learning to build faith and confidence as deliberately as she built muscle. Learning, too, that her biggest opponent was often herself.
And now Chun – who is already an Olympic bronze medalist, a National Wrestling Hall of Fame inductee and now Iowa’s USA TODAY’s Woman of the Year – has reached a new career peak. She’s both the first head coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s wrestling team, currently competing in its first season, and the first leader of such a program in an NCAA Power 5 Conference.
“I’ve been lucky. I feel like these opportunities don’t come around often,” she says. “So the question is: How do you want to live your life? Do you want to seize those opportunities and see where you can go with them?”
In Chun’s case, the answer is, decidedly, yes. Even when those shots scare her, even when she knows she doesn’t have all the answers or all the skills, Chun is all in.
Part of that drive is athlete’s moxie, sure. But it’s also about visibility, she says, about being, publicly, the woman and the coach that she didn’t have when she was coming up.
“Sometimes we pick our profession. Sometimes our profession picks us. For Clarissa, this sport picked her,” says Terry Steiner, women’s head coach for USA Wrestling and Chun’s mentor and friend. “She’s in a position where she can have a lot of influence right now. Everyone is looking to the University of Iowa.”
Question: What can the sport of wrestling teach about the practice of life?
Answer: What I love about wrestling is that it allows you to discover who you are and what you’re made of through the hardest of moments. There’s a Japanese proverb – nana korobi ya oki – which means, “Fall down seven times, get up eight” and that just mimics life. You’re gonna get taken down, so how are you going to pick yourself up? And how are you going to move forward?
It was wrestling that really taught me that perseverance.
Who paved the way for you?
In regard to wrestling, Tricia Saunders. (A pioneer in women’s wrestling, Saunders is a five-time world champion and a National Wrestling Hall of Fame inductee. As a 12-year-old, she was barred from competition because of her gender, but her family sued and won, enshrining all girls’ right to participate alongside boys.)
I wrestled her my freshman year in college and got my butt whooped. For a while, I looked at her as just a competitor. She was the one to beat if I wanted to get to the highest of levels.
But after she retired, I started learning more about the things she fought for. She was bold enough to get in front of the president of USA Wrestling and the CEO of USA Wrestling and say, “We demand this.” A stipend, for example. She was definitely a driving force for change. Without her, who knows how long women could have gone on not receiving the same opportunities as men.
Tell me about a match that changed your life and what you learned.
I would say my Olympic Trials finals in 2008 in Las Vegas. I was No. 2 or 3 on the ladder for the longest time. I had a hard time believing in myself, in my abilities. I always put my top opponents on a pedestal because of those self-limiting beliefs, like, she’s bigger. She’s stronger. She’s wrestled longer.
I had to beat Patricia Miranda, and I had lost to her two months prior. But after that loss, I said out loud to myself: “I’m not gonna lose to her again.”
And I didn’t, and that punched my ticket to the Olympics, which obviously makes it memorable.
But it is probably the most memorable match in my career because I finally believed in myself. We work so hard, but if you don’t believe you can do it, you’re just giving the other person all the power.
What’s your guiding principle?
I grew up going to a Buddhist elementary school in Hawaii and our mantra was: Be kind and gentle to every little thing. Maybe wrestling’s not always gentle, but when you say guiding principles, I think about my upbringing and that school, which built the foundation of who I am as a person. I know there’s good qualities in everyone and you just never know what anyone is going through. So I’ve always been brought up to treat others, especially the elderly, with respect and kindness.
Your first season as coach is almost over. What’s one moment that sticks out to you?
I came across an older woman who was a season ticket holder and she said to me, “I didn’t think girls should wrestle. But I will come and watch your women wrestle.” But that’s what’s awesome. That’s what I love about my ability to change people’s perspective and mind around what they’re normally used to seeing. Because why can’t girls and women wrestle? Just because it wasn’t available to them in their time doesn’t mean we shouldn’t move forward and not open those doors.
“I’ve been lucky. I feel like these opportunities don’t come around often. So the question is: How do you want to live your life? Do you want to seize those opportunities and see where you can go with them?”
What are your long-term goals for the program?
Graduate all our women is No. 1. Anyone that comes through our program gets a degree, period.
Everyone on the team is so unique and interesting. They all have a story, whether it’s where they came from or what they’re going through or what they’re pursuing. Their time here is so limited and sometimes we forget that when we’re day in and day out. So both on and off the mat my focus is what can they discover of themselves during their time here, because this is such a critical and pivotal time in their lives of selfgrowth.
And win national titles, obviously.
That’s the fun part.