2020 International Rankings - Women's Freestyle

50 Kilograms - Mariya Stadnik

After meetings featuring many cups of coffee (some decaf) and cinnamon buns at Maddie’s Bakery, other in-person discussion, numerous texts, lots of video, and even more second- and third-guessing, the inaugural international women’s rankings finally came together. 

Our basic strategy was starting with the UWW rankings and moving on from there. We faced a number of issues: No. 1, obviously, was the dearth of recent events in virus-clouded 2020. We put heavy emphasis on last year’s World and Japan championships, and this year’s European and Asian Championships, and Pan Am Olympic Qualifier and Pellicone tournaments. A second issue was a lack of information on which wrestlers might be moving up or down to Olympic weights and, if so, how we should rank them in their new weight classes (Sarah Hildebrandt is a good example of this). Third, the difficulty of getting current information from other countries (neither of us reads Japanese, Russian, Hindi or Chinese). We did our best to compare head-to-head and to not put three Japanese women in every top 10. 

While we admit we are far from experts, we are satisfied with our rankings. We realize we have much to learn, but we are excited about and honest to the process – and we look forward to the full resumption of wrestling soon. And many more coffees and buns at Maddie’s.

For feedback, questions and inquires, please contact Ben Levendusky at Ben@americanwomenswrestling.com.