I became a writer, but not how they teach it in classrooms or MFA programs. I didn’t intern at a paper. Instead, I learned first how to observe human behavior from the bleachers of a high school gym in Sussex County, New Jersey. My notebooks were score sheets, handwriting looping across columns that would never be published. But even then I was archiving, collecting pieces of something larger than myself.

I wasn’t a wrestler and my name has never been featured on the front page. But I was there, and I remember everything. I remember the smell of mats, the sting of the bleach when we mopped them, and the way a gym filled with bodies could feel cavernous once everyone fell silent. The silence wasn’t emptiness. It was tension, inhaled breaths waiting to be let out.

No one has told this version, the one from the edges, the one where my clipboards carried stories like weight in their hands, the one where I kept stats, held jackets, and watched something extraordinary unfold without ever stepping into the spotlight. I never stood in the circle, but I was close enough to feel the vibration of every slam.

Seven years after graduation, I found myself on the final ruck march of my military basic training. Legs screaming and lungs on fire, I heard his voice faintly. He had trained me for more than stats. He taught me to endure with mental and physical toughness through sacrifice, through the display of my blood, sweat, and tears, always ending in the pride following the pain. I wasn’t just keeping scores anymore. I was keeping myself from quitting.

An echo of John Gill on the mats’ edge returned to me. The cadence of his coaching overlapped with the echo of my drill sergeant’s commands, and I realized then that endurance has many dialects, but the lesson is the same. Wrestling in all its forms can transform and inspire us.

Coach Gill might never understand what it meant to a girl like me, but I do, and so do other millennial teenage girls of that time. Cougar Wrestling wasn’t just a team, but a dynasty, built not only on wins but on rituals, sweat-drenched mornings, and the unyielding repetition of drills. The kids who showed up early, cold, and quiet deserve to be remembered. Their effort was a hymn, and their sacrifice our scripture. We were all part of this community, and this shared experience shaped us.

Kitattinny’s wrestling room and gym taught me that endurance isn’t just physical but quiet. They taught me how to just sit with things, to keep count, to hold weight that wasn’t mine and make it matter anyway. The memory was its own kind of muscle, one of loyalty and dedication, carried forward long after the mats were rolled away. It lives in how I approach my work, love, parenting, and survival. Wrestling’s lessons seeped into the marrow of everything I became.

I didn’t think as a teenager I was collecting something sacred, and those moments would shape me. Hearing the phrase “Pain is temporary, pride is forever” a hundred times echoed over the years, rising again when I needed to keep pushing forward. I took pride in every ache-causing step of that march I knew would fade but never truly disappear.

Some places stay with you long after you abandon them. For me, it’s a small-town gym in North Jersey, thick with sweat and Gatorade, but with a heavy history. Blue mats line wall to wall, a patchwork battlefield where every winter weekend was fought. That room wasn’t just a stage. It was an altar we all came to kneel at in our own way.

Every Saturday morning, I parked my butt in that gym lobby waiting for the bus. Quiet and steady, with a clipboard in hand, just trying to matter. Wrestling isn’t just a sport in our state. It is the spine of the week, but more than that, it is a community breeding respect from the moment you can first run laps around the mat until you are eighteen.

Cougar Wrestling isn’t just a team. It becomes your life and your entire world for those years in high school. We organized our calendars around it. Birthdays, holidays, even snowstorms bent to its will. Before sunrise some Saturdays, mats rolled out like a ritual, and sneakers squeaked on polished wood.

I didn’t think it meant anything when Coach Gill handed me a clipboard for the first time. Just a scrap of paper, a pencil, a task to help one day after school for wrestling-offs. But I kept showing up, tracking scores, deciphering his chicken scratch, witnessing the cracks in their armor before anyone else did. I noticed which wrestler tugged at his knee brace when nervous, which one always hummed under his breath during warm-ups and pulled his hoodie strings tight as though retreating into a shell. I learned their stories in fragments, pieced together like a quilt stitched on the edge of the mat.

In this sport, a varsity jacket was currency, and I wasn’t wearing one, but I was close enough to feel its weight. Sometimes, I was invisible, but invisibility can be powerful. It lets you see the unguarded moments others miss.

The wrestlers were loud, cocky, and untouchable, or so many seemed. But they gave up everything for that mat. Bloodied noses, split lips, taped fingers, and aching ribs. They sacrificed every winter weekend for four straight years, some for their entire childhood until they turned eighteen. There is nothing else in the world comparable to the sport of wrestling. On the mat, wrestlers hear and see nothing other than the opponent and the goal in front of them, respecting each with dignity. Shake hands and grapple to the fall. The satisfaction of achievement in the fall makes it all worth it for the wrestler and those in the community watching. Like a collective exhale, you can feel the ripple of relief through the bleachers.

I sat on the edge, watching them break and rebuild themselves weekly. They didn’t always see me, not really. Isn’t that a strange ache of adolescence? To be invisible and needed at the same time.

I can still hear the noise of those bleachers at times. I watched boys become men, and some still live in my heart. Some never left town, never left my memory, and still don’t know someone saw them trying to keep it together. I remember their laughter in hallways, how they carried themselves, their strange mix of fragility and bravado defining them at sixteen.

Girls like me were always there, sitting quietly at every match. We saw the tears, the taped wrists, the way some boys only smiled after making weight. We updated stat sheets and watched parents pacing in the stands, girlfriends hiding tears behind their sleeves, little brothers mimicking takedowns on the sidelines. We were always there, just off to the side, remembering, a form of loyalty all its own.

Texas gave you Friday Night Lights. I had Saturday Morning Mats, and I loved them as fiercely, even if the world never broadcast my version. They were ours, and they shaped us. Our whole town pulsed to the rhythm of wrestling season, and we were its silent archivists.

No one told our story, so I will tell it with as much honesty as the mats deserve and as much reverence as the whistle demands. My clipboard feels heavier than it used to, so it’s time to set it down, one story at a time. Each entry is another match, another bus ride, another echo preserved.

This isn’t a sports story. It’s mythology. My love letter, record, and burn book. I didn’t write this to explain wrestling, but to show why it matters. Why does it still echo? Even now, decades later, why can I still smell disinfectant in the air and hear the crowd roar as if it were yesterday?

This is for those who lived under the banners but never got named. This is for those of us who were always there.

This isn’t about glory or victory, but about belonging. It’s about the quiet ones who arrived early, stayed late, and saw everything. It’s about bruises hidden under sleeves, whispered encouragements in locker rooms, and parents driving home through snowstorms while kids dozed against windows.

With love from the edge of the bleachers,
                                                                                                 — The Stat Girl