Western Colorado University is set to add women’s wrestling as an NCAA Division II and Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference (RMAC) varsity sport. The Mountaineer program is set to begin competing in the 2026-27 academic year.
The addition increases the athletics department’s number of varsity sports to 14, and will be the eighth women’s sport at Western. Van Hee will begin a national search for the head coach immediately. With an expected hiring date this summer, and an official start date of Sept. 1, the head coach will spend the ensuing year recruiting and setting up the structure of the program. An assistant coach will be added to the staff prior to its first season of competition.
The long and storied history of the Western men’s wrestling program and Gunnison’s strong community support for the sport made the addition of the women’s program a sensible decision for the university to consider. Over its history, the Mountaineer men’s wrestling program has produced seven RMAC teams titles, 16 individual national champions and 137 All-Americans. National Wrestling Coaches Association Hall of Famer Tracy Borah led the Mountaineers to the very first NCAA DII wrestling title in 1963, then repeated that feat by winning the title at the 1964 championship.
Van Hee is the program’s winningest coach with a career-winning percentage of .657 (182-94-5). The current head coach and three-time All-American Charlie Pipher is next on that list with a winning percentage of .633 (76-44). Van Hee tops the list for total wins, and took the top spot in his final season (2017), surpassing Borah’s 176 victories over his illustrious career.
More than 350 middle and high school girls participated in Western’s 2024 Rocky Mountain wrestling camps.The numbers proved that the initiation of a program at Western, combined with the in-place resources worked in favor of the addition.
Statistics from the 2024-25 academic year show that 46 state tournaments for girls were hosted at the high school level. After women’s wrestling was added as an NCAA emerging sport in June 2020, it became an official NCAA championship sport in January 2025. The first NCAA Women’s Wrestling Championships slated for the winter of 2026.
The championship will include all programs from Divisions I, II and III. It will bring together qualifiers from 108 NCAA programs that provide more than 1,200 student-athletes the opportunity to wrestle at the collegiate level.
The Western program will join an RMAC list that includes women’s teams from Adams State University, Chadron State University and Colorado Mesa University, as well as women’s wrestling associate members Simon Fraser University and Texas Woman’s University.
(Gregg Petcoff is the assistant athletics director for communications at Western Colorado University and can be reached at gpetcoff@western.edu.)
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