‘Slowly but surely we’re kind of tearing down the societal obstacles that have previously been there.’
– Kenya Sloan
DOVER, Del. — Kenya Sloan, whose resume is filled with wrestling accolades, started the Delaware State University’s women’s wrestling team — a Division I program — on short notice.
Hired less than three months before the start of DSU’s 2025-26 academic year, during the season when two of Sloan’s wrestlers earned berths at the first-ever NCAA Division I National Championship in March.
On her inaugural roster is Kylee Gaddy, a 2025 Holy Spirit graduate who grew up in Upper Township and Ocean City, N.J. and started wrestling around age 7 with the Upper Township Hornets.
Sloan is a Knoxville, Tenn., native and four-time state high school wrestling champion who compiled an 87-0 record and, as a senior, was the top-ranked wrestler nationally at 180 pounds.
A team captain at Campbellsville University, she was a 2022 NAIA National Champion at 155 pounds, a Mid-South Conference Champion, a two-time NAIA All-American, a two-time WCWA All-American and a four-time Academic All-American.
She represented Team USA and won gold at the 2019 Junior Pan American Championships and earned a gold medal at the Berlin Open, dominating the 76 kg. weight class with four consecutive victories.
A wrestler since childhood, Sloan talked with the Sentinel about the growth of women’s wrestling, starting a Division I program, being the first among Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBU) and what it takes to be part of a team like hers.
You’ve been involved with wrestling for quite some time and at a high level as an athlete and a coach, you began wrestling at age 7 according to your profile. To what do you attribute such a growth in the sport since you were a youth wrestler and has it accelerated?
Oh, it’s absolutely accelerated. When I was a child, I wrestled in Tennessee and the majority of the time I’d be the only female wrestler at any competition that I was at. That’s kind of unheard of for any state at this point. The growth has accelerated for youth levels for girls, high schoolers and even at the collegiate level.
To what do you attribute that?
I think females have maybe craved a sport like this for a long time. There are other sports that allow girls and women to display their strength and their perseverance and their grit, right? I might be a bit biased, but I think wrestling offers a very unique platform to demonstrate certain qualities. It’s the reason that men love this sport. And now women love it for the same reasons.
Slowly but surely we’re kind of tearing down the societal obstacles that have previously been there.
I think it’s not a surprise to see girls and women’s wrestling as big as it is today and as fast as it continues to grow. The biggest thing is that in society, it’s just more accepted. We’ve got support instead of barriers. When I was a child, there were people that told me I shouldn’t wrestle. I’m not the only one that has that story. There are people who had it far worse, but that’s not really a narrative that you have anymore. People are building a foundation and making it feel more normal so that other people weren’t so scared of it. Now that it’s accepted, it’s going great.
What were the challenges of inaugurating a Division I women’s wrestling team?
There are challenges in doing anything for the first time, right? This has never been done before quite in the way that it’s being done now.
There are six Division I women’s wrestling programs that competed this year (at the NCAA Division I National Championship). I think there’ll be a few more next year. We are the first one to do it as a Historically Black College.
The challenges are what you would expect — introducing a sport to university that’s never had it before, so we’re teaching the administration what our sport is, what the demands of our sport are, what our needs are. It’s not an obstacle, but a challenge.
The challenge was building a team in such a short amount of time.
I got hired in mid-June. It starts in August. We had a long way to go to build a team and not a lot of time to do it, and we pulled it off.
Even being able to find athletes to roster this first year was a bit of a challenge.
This is the first HBCU to field a Division I women’s wrestling team. What does that mean to you?
Being an HBCU was not an additional challenge. Maybe just in the fact that I’m like teaching a sport to a community that doesn’t know a lot about it already could be considered a challenge. Really it was an asset to me in building this program because it attracts a certain demographic of athlete that other programs might not be able to attract. It’s one of my biggest recruiting pools and highlights.
People want to come here because we will have one of the best women’s wrestling programs in the country, but this first year, we didn’t have that.
This first year, all of my recruits came really for one of two reasons. They really believed in me as a coach and the vision I had for our program, or they really had this desire to attend an Historically Black College and wrestle at a high level. As of now, we’re the only place you could do that.
What was it like to have two of your wrestlers make the NCAA Division I Championship tournament?
I felt very proud. Doing a job like this one has its ups and its downs and it is tiresome, and it requires full commitment. You could never do a good job at this and have one foot in and one foot out. That’s on my part and that’s on the part of all the athletes as well.
For the two that qualified, I thought that they deserved it. We all put in the same amount of commitment and it made me feel relieved. I wish all of them could. They all put in the same amount of work.
But I think relieved is probably the best single word I could use to describe how I felt when they both qualified, because this is their dream, and it’s my dream to help them make their dreams come true.
I’m really glad that they did it in a way that paves the way for the other athletes that’ll follow in their footsteps on this in the future of the program.
How does them qualifying bode for the future of your program?
This first year I didn’t really know what to expect with the roster that we brought in. My goal for every subsequent year is for us to have 10 qualifiers for the national tournament, which is the max amount that a program can have. I’m glad that we have two that have been there. They know what it’s like to qualify and they know what it’s like to wrestle in the tournament. I hope they lead the way and every year after this that we’ll have eight other athletes to join them.
Do you see an expansion of Division I women’s wrestling in the future?
Absolutely.
What makes DSU a place high school girls should consider attending to be on your team?
Not every high school girl should consider Delaware State. It’s tough, but I think for the athlete that is prepared for that we’re a great place. I’ve set a standard of excellence for all the athletes on the team.
I tell them often that I’ll never expect them to be perfect because they can’t be, but I will expect them to be excellent, which they can. And I hold them accountable to that standard and they hold each other accountable to that standard, whether that means repetitions of a technique, effort in our conditioning, how we prepare for our competition, how we handle our work in the classroom, how we conduct ourselves with our professors and in and around other teams.
The standard is always excellence, and I am unwavering in that expectation. For an athlete who can conform to that standard, I think that Delaware State is the best place. We’re a family. We hold each other accountable. They hold each other accountable, but they do it out of a place of love because we’re all here for the same reason. That’s to build the program, to become one of the best and highest-regarded women’s wrestling programs in the nation, but it’s also to build champions. Every ounce of accountability comes from a good place.
And we have fun. We do. That’s another thing you can find. They really do it. Man, we work hard, but we play hard and we celebrate hard. We celebrate each other, we celebrate the small wins. You know, we laugh hard. In a very short amount of time, this team does feel like a family. I think that’s a very special thing to be a part of.
See coach Sloan’s comments about Kylee Gaddy in the related story.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
Photo courtesy of Kylee Gaddy.