Anderson receives wrestling scholarship

Moorcroft High School (MHS) senior Rebekah Anderson has been accepted to Dickinson College on a wrestling scholarship.

Anderson is the second MHS female wrestler to receive a scholarship for this sport since girls wrestling was sanctioned in Wyoming in 2020. Charmayne DeLong took her dreams to Indiana Tech, according to long-time Wolves wrestling team writer Marci Allison.

"I started wrestling in second grade," Anderson explains how she was introduced to the sport, "My brother had wrestled the year before, when he was in preschool and when my dad and mom had seen how much girls wrestling had grown, I and all three of my sisters tried wrestling that year."

She said that two of them decided to pursue basketball instead and the third wrestles "off and on", wrestling in third grade and eighth grade, though she remained involved as a manager in the intervening years.

Anderson speaks to the passion she feels for wrestling: "It's how much it relates to life and the life lessons you can learn through it. Some people never learn their unique life lessons that have to do with resilience and mental strength."

"[The scholarship] was my goal," the athlete continues. "I've kind of gone back and forth; before women's wrestling got sanctioned, I didn't know if I wanted to wrestle in college just because I was feeling kind of defeated, having to wrestle boys all the time. When it got sanctioned, I realized I did want to wrestle in college. I started looking into some school I liked and went and saw what their prices were and what kind of scholarships they had available and what kind of team they had."

She knew the sanction would ultimately come through, "Knowing it would eventually get better for other girls and, if I quit, I wouldn't be there to help encourage them, especially the girls from around here, to wrestle."

There are a few reasons Anderson chose the North Dakota college:

"I like Dickenson because it has more of a smaller hometown feeling...The town is a little bit bigger than Gillette and the campus just had a homey feeling. I really like the coaches and their philosophy about hard work/having fun and they have a good team building program."

These values are familiar to Anderson as Wolves wrestling coach Charlie Williams, who has brought the MHS teams to championships for more than a decade, wrestled for and graduated from this college.

Anderson says of the career goals she hopes to see this college facilitate, "I will be studying exercise science, a four-year degree and then I'll have to go into a graduate program to get my athletic training certificate. Once I've graduated from college, I'll be able to be an athletic trainer and help injured athletes get back in shape and get recovered."

Her parents, who first introduced her and her siblings to wrestling, "have always been supportive" of her choice to stay with the sport, Anderson says. "They have seen my potential since I was younger, so they're very excited for me."

The senior spoke, too, about her hope for the sport in the larger context, "I just want to see the sport be successful and become more of a societal norm of women's wrestling. There are some people in society who still think it's wrong for women to wrestle just because 'it's a man's sport.' I just want to see those tables completely turned over."