- Details
- By Levi Rickert
Landri Von Gonten didn’t set out to become a wrestler, but when she decided to give it a try, she fell in love. Within four years, she was one of the top wrestlers in the United States.
Landri, a Chickasaw citizen, is beginning her fifth year of wrestling and at age 16 has already racked up some impressive accomplishments. However, if it wasn’t for the COVID-19 pandemic, she might never have begun wrestling in the first place.
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In Landri’s family, it is a rule she and her brothers play a sport as a way to keep them active and healthy. In fifth grade, Landri chose football.
“I had always been a tomboy,” she said. “I always followed both my brothers around, and they played football. Growing up I was always with them at their practices. I have always tried all the sports, but I just wanted to try football. I always loved football.”
Even though she wanted to play football, it wasn’t easy to get started. At the time, Landri and her family lived in College Station, Texas, and the local football club wouldn’t let her try out because she was a girl.
However, there was a football club in Bryan, Texas, about 5 miles away that let her try out, and she made the team.
“I was the only girl on the team,” Landri said. “But they treated me like everybody else. They didn’t really look at my gender.”
Many times, when female football players are represented in the media, they are usually shown as the kicker, but that was not the case with Landri. She had a chance to play all the positions, but primarily outside and middle linebacker.
Landri enjoyed football, but it came to an abrupt halt when COVID hit. Her team shut down, as did most teams.
Even though they were in the midst of a pandemic, Landri still wanted to find a sport to participate in and keep her active, so she decided to try jiu-jitsu. One of Landri’s brothers had recently switched from football to wrestling, and just like she had watched him play football, she now watched him wrestle and wanted to try that too. She was in seventh grade.
“I asked my parents if I could try it,” Landri said. “And I just ended up falling in love with wrestling.”
Landri said she loves that wrestling is both a team and an individual sport.
“You compete individually,” she said, “but you have a team behind you, supporting you.”
Her school, Woodlands College Park High School in The Woodlands, Texas, has full varsity and junior varsity teams for both girls and boys. The gender does not matter, though, because they all support one another.
“We are all one big friend group,” Landri said. “We all talk to each other and hang out on the weekends. We’re always with each other.”
In addition to the camaraderie of being on the team, she also appreciates how the sport challenges her as an individual.
“I have learned not to let one loss define the rest of a tournament,” Landri said. “I can battle back and show that I can persevere. It is physically and mentally demanding.”
The high school wrestling season runs from November through February, but for Landri, wrestling is a yearlong endeavor. She, like most of the wrestlers on her team, also belongs to a wrestling club that is active in the offseason. They have morning practices where they run and lift weights, and then meet after school to practice more. They also have the chance to go to tournaments, though it is against the rules to do club tournaments during the high school season.
Though Landri has been steadily progressing as a wrestler, in 2025 she had two major accomplishments, the first of which came in July at the 2025 United States Marine Corps Junior National Wrestling Championship in Fargo, North Dakota. Landri said this is one of the top three tournaments in the country.
“The competition was good because everybody there is good,” Landri said. “You have to qualify to go to the tournament, so you have to make sure you’re on top of your game.”
Asked how many competitors she faced, Landri said the competition was probably somewhere between six to eight matches.
She took the matches one by one, focusing on her technique and staying in the present. This strategy worked out because she kept winning, one match after another.
When she won the final match, she could barely believe it.
“I was in complete shock,” Landri said. “You can see it on my face in the video. I couldn’t believe I did it.”
Landri was the first-place winner in the age 16 and under, 130-pound weight class for one of the most prestigious wrestling tournaments in the country.
Though 2025 was already an exciting year for Landri, she was about to get an even bigger surprise.
“I was sitting in history class and FloWrestling sent me a message on Instagram,” Landri said. “We aren’t supposed to be on our phones in class, but I saw the notification come up that they were inviting me to compete in ‘Who’s Number One?’ I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t even respond. I just had to pretend I hadn’t seen it.”
“Who’s Number One?,” hosted by FloWrestling, is a single match competition between the top two nationally ranked wrestlers in each weight class. Landri was ranked No. 2, so she was invited to Coralville, Iowa, to compete against the No. 1 ranked wrestler in her class.
Landri said it felt weird to be doing a competition where she would only wrestle a single match, but she trusted her preparation and her coach’s plan.
“My coaches watch film, but I don’t,” Landri said. “It stresses me out. I don’t want to wrestle her match. I want to wrestle my match.”
Once the match was finished, Landri answered the question of who was No. 1. She had her second major victory of the year.
At age 16, Landri is far from done with her wrestling career. Her current goal is to make the world team, but she said that looking further into her future, she wants to continue wrestling in college.
“College wrestling is something I definitely want to pursue,” Landri said. “And then maybe shoot my shot for the Olympics in either 2028 or 2032.”
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