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Clarissa Chun acknowledged that luck and timing played a part in her current situation, but there’s more to the story than that.
“For me, it was always about doing my best. My parents instilled in me at a young age that I shouldn’t start anything that I wouldn’t finish, and all they asked of me was to do my best. better,” she said in a Zoom interview. “They never pressured me to win or anything like that — it was me just putting in the effort to do it. to arrive.”
She got there – and beyond.
The Roosevelt High School graduate has become a trailblazer for female wrestlers at various levels.
She won a state wrestling title in 1998, the year Hawaii became the first state in the nation to sanction high school female wrestling as a sport. She also won the following year as a senior.
The 4-foot-11 dynamo turned her passion into a career as a champion wrestler, including winning four US Open titles.
In 2012, the two-time Olympian won a bronze medal at the London Games, becoming the only Hawaiian wrestler to win an Olympic medal.
Seven months ago, Chun was named the first coach of the University of Iowa women’s wrestling program.
Earlier this month, she reached the pinnacle by being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Okla.
“When they said I was going to be inducted, I felt so honored that some people felt like I belonged in the hall, because there are amazing athletes and coaches that are on the wall at National Wrestling Hall. of Fame,” she said.
“I never really looked at my career and I stopped and enjoyed it as much as I did this weekend,” she added. “Throughout my career, I always felt that I would have liked to do more as an athlete. I would like to do one more world team, one more world medal, one more Olympic. I think that it’s just me wanting to do better and cement my career a bit more.
Chun’s career started on another mat and in the water.
She grew up competing in club judo competitions with her older brother. She won five junior national championships as a judoka. Her first taste of wrestling came in the mid-1990s when she attended tournaments to support her male judo friends.
“It was the first time I saw girls wrestling, but they were wrestling boys,” Chun said in an interview last year with the Star-Advertiser. “I didn’t think ‘I’m going to do this one day.’ I never thought that.
She started on the swim team her first two years of high school before moving to the wrestling team her freshman year.
“Some of the guys on the wrestling team who did judo would say, ‘Clarissa, you really should wrestle,'” Chun said.
The transition was smooth as Chun used her judo technique to help her win the 1998 state title. The following year, with another state title, she placed third at the United States Girls Wrestling Association High School Nationals.
“Clarissa had to carve out a path for herself,” Joel Kawachi said.
Kawachi, who coached Moanalua to three consecutive state titles (1999-2001) in women’s wrestling, remembered Chun and wrestlers from other schools who accompanied his team and that of Kahuku’s Reggie Torres to national tournaments. on the continent.
“(Moanalua) was successful in numbers in a growing sport, but not Roosevelt,” he explained. “We really enjoyed having her. She always has a positive personality and it’s great to be around.
Chun said Roosevelt only had one other female wrestler, but she competed in a different weight class. Her high school coach told her she could “fight for the 103 pound boys spot if you want”. So I did. I wrestled boys in a double meet and every time that there was a tournament, I was wrestling 98-pound girls.
Today, Chun has moved on to wrestling coaching. In November, she was named a women’s wrestling coach at Iowa, which was her dream college out of high school.
In her office in Iowa City, Chun has a framed document from the Hawaii State Senate in 1999, congratulating her on her aforementioned accomplishments. She summed up the last paragraph, which said she planned to attend the University of Iowa to major in communications and pursue her wrestling career at the NCAA level.
Iowa did not have a women’s wrestling team at the time, but its men’s team dominated college wrestling in the 1990s, when it won eight of its 24 national championships.
“I applied just thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll be a manager, maybe they’ll give me a place on the mat to practice’, even though I knew there probably wouldn’t be any lucky,” she said. “Wrestling was not accepted as such in the late 90s/early 2000s.
“I think it was my lack of understanding of what it meant that Hawaii was the first state to sanction girls’ wrestling as a high school sport,” Chun added. “I knew other states weren’t doing it, but I don’t think I understood what that really meant in terms of opportunity and where the sport was at at that time.”
Chun instead attended Missouri Valley College, where she was a member of one of the first collegiate women’s wrestling teams in the United States and won two college national championships before accepting an invitation to the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. , Colorado.
Twenty-two years after applying to Iowa, the school added women’s wrestling to its intercollegiate athletics program, becoming the first Power 5 school to offer the sport. Iowa hired Chun two months later to be its first head coach.
“It’s exciting because now these young girls feel like they could have equal opportunities,” she said of this milestone. “Up until this year, the programs that offered women’s wrestling were smaller schools, private schools, NAIA or Division II/Division III schools, and maybe some student-athletes want to study something specific that ‘a private school does not offer.’
Hawkeyes women’s wrestling won’t begin until the 2023-24 school year, but its female wrestlers, who will be wearing red shirts this year, are allowed to compete this year as independents. They announced the official signing of 11 wrestlers to date, including Makawao native and four-time Hawaii State Champion Nanea Estrella, who wrestled for Lahainaluna High School.
Most Division I coaches have a roster to work with when hired to coach a program. Being a program’s first coach meant Chun was tasked with building a roster from scratch while following Division I recruiting rules to stay NCAA compliant. Now she is determining how she will distribute the scholarships.
One thing Chun has known since she was hired is the culture she wants to establish for the program.
“I like that competitive team atmosphere, which means they’re going to fight for each other,” she said. “Wrestling sometimes feels like an individual sport because you’re on the mat against someone else. It takes a team to make it happen because you train together, you push each other and you lift each other up. Expectations are to work harder for each other.
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