If you’re a student-athlete in a mainstream sport like football or basketball, there are plenty of colleges that offer those sports. Coaches look for good talent and have scholarships to offer to the best athletes, who also perform well in the classroom.

If you’re a female wrestler, more and more high schools have girls’ wrestling programs. You don’t find schools – high schools or colleges – that have fencing or other sports that have a fewer number of kids participating. For that, there are club teams and other opportunities, but what about college? There aren’t too many colleges that have fencing teams.

A pair of Emmaus students – Olivya Kroope and Quinn Peck - found their way through the maze and will get to continue in their chosen sport while pursuing an education in the field of study that they chose. Kroope competed in wrestling and will attend Edinboro University where she will study early childhood education, while Peck will major in physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he will continue his fencing career.

For Peck, finding a school that offered fencing and also has a strong physics program was not an easy task. There aren’t many schools that offer fencing and some of them don’t offer physics. And then, some are D1 schools and some are D3, so a student-athlete has to figure that into the equation as well.

“It was pretty difficult to find a school,” said Peck, who competes at fencing clubs around the country, with some of them being in the Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey area. “There are only about 30 or 40 schools in the country that offer fencing and about half are D1 and half are D3. It was a very selective process, and I’m really glad that I found a school.”

NJIT met exactly what Peck wanted, plus it’s not too far from home.

For Kroope, things were made a little easier when the PIAA sanctioned girls’ wrestling three years ago.

Emmaus sponsored girls’ wrestling as a club sport for the 2023-2024 school year and then adopted it as an official varsity sport the following year.

Kroope could have wrestled on the boys’ team but knew that it would be difficult to succeed. Kroope’s father Steven, and Peyton Schneck, another female wrestler at Emmaus, worked to build a team. Kroope also has a younger brother who wrestles at Emmaus, so the sport has sort of been in her family all along.

“I watched my brother wrestle since he was in kindergarten, and I always wanted to wrestle; I just never did,” said Olivya Kroope. “Finally, in my freshman year, I thought ‘I’m going to do this.’ My dad was on board, and he helped me figure it out,” said Kroope.

While girls’ wrestling is exploding at the high school level, its growth at the college level is lagging behind. Obviously, it takes time for wrestlers to reach college age and then have enough of them for colleges and universities to start programs. Plus, not every girl – or boy – who wrestles in high school decides to continue in college.

“I knew a couple girls who were seniors and they were graduating and weren’t going to wrestle in college,” Kroope said. “There just aren’t enough girls for schools, especially smaller schools, to have a team.”

Kroope was a building block for the program at Emmaus and will be in the same position at Edinboro, where the team has just two members. A key factor for Kroope was that the school she chose also had to have an excellent academic record and that played a large part in her decision to attend Edinboro.

“I was looking at D1 or D2 schools and I knew I wanted the focus to be on academics, which is why I chose a D2 school,” said Kroope, who found Edinboro while at a tournament in Fargo, ND. “I went to Fargo last year and at the training camp, I met coach Cook (Edinboro coach Ryan Cook) and he asked me to visit, and right when I got there, I thought this is where I want to go.”

Emmaus is also sending two male wrestlers on in their wrestling careers. Jackson Max will attend Pennsylvania College of Technology to major in Construction Management and Concrete Science. Xayden Sallit will major in healthcare management and supervision at the University of Pittsburgh - Johnstown.