A year ago Jacie Livengood '27 was posting flyers across campus and pinning down students – any students! -- who showed the slightest interest in helping start a wrestling club at the College.

A year later, look how far Guilford’s wrestling club and Jacie have come: The College’s nascent club has grown to five wrestlers and a volunteer coach. And Jacie will compete March 13-15 at the National Club Wrestling Championships in Bossier City, La.

“I was a little shocked, a little surprised, but in a good way,” says Jacie, when she learned she had qualified. “But now I’ve moved on from surprise to getting ready to compete.”

Not bad for a student who thought she’d play softball in college until a high school friend persuaded her to give wrestling a shot. She wrestled her final two years at Wake Forest High School near Raleigh and has been hooked ever since.

“I showed up (for the first practice) and I fell in love with the sport,” she says. “Since then I've been soaking up all the information I can about it.”

It’s not just the sport that Jacie enjoys. She likes the community the sport fosters among its athletes. “No matter where you are, if you're a wrestler, we're all united in some way,” she says. “I've been around multiple high school and college clubs and no matter what team we're on, we're all united by the fact we wrestle. We all know how hard we all work to get to our goals. That brings us together.”

With Brenda Swearingin, Professor of Sport Studies, serving as faculty advisor, Guilford’s wrestling club has competed against other clubs including Virginia Tech, East Carolina, James Madison, Clemson, South Carolina and Tennessee. Other members of the club include William Rumley ’28, Dani Santos ’28, Johnny Peake ’26, and Aaron Berry ’27.

Brenda remembers Jacie approaching her last fall about starting a wrestling club. Brenda instantly remembered her swimming club at Dewey High School in Dewey, Okla. "I wanted desperately to swim in the state high school championships and I had teachers who volunteered to come to swim meets to sponsore me so I could swim in the championships. I've been fed by people who feed me. We do this because others have done for us."

Jacie, who is 3-1 this season, qualified for nationals based on a season-long points system. The team has since hired Joe Smith, a wrestling coach at a nearby high school, as the club’s volunteer coach.

Jacie, a member of Guilford’s Omicron Kappa Delta academic honors society, is an Experiential Design major minoring in Philosophy and Sports Marketing. She says she never would have gotten the support and encouragement at a larger school to start a wrestling club and says Brenda has been a driving force to get the program off the ground.

“That's one of the best things about Guilford is the faculty is always looking out for students,” says Jacie.

“I never would have had this amount of support somewhere larger," she says. "I would never be taken care of as a student athlete the way I am at Guilford. And I've never had a coach able to give such focus to every wrestler like we do here. Guilford is small enough so that we can work on skills, and we can work on development. I'm very excited to see where this goes next year."