Gretchen Donally spent her summer wrestling for two different flags; Team USA's, on mats halfway around the world, and Colorado Mesa's, waiting for her back in Grand Junction. By the time she steps onto campus for her junior season, the two will be impossible to separate.
 
In July, Donally headlined the U.S. women's freestyle team at the 2026 U20 Pan American Championships in Rio de Janeiro, going 4-0 to win gold at 72 kg, a run that included a technical fall over Canada's Jolina Healey and a 5-3 decision over Brazil's Rayne Alves da Silva. Three days later, wrestling beach style for the first time on that stage, she added a second gold medal, defeating Puerto Rico's Paola Rodriguez Guzman in her opener and closing out the +70 kg bracket on a medical forfeit from her Brazilian opponent. Team USA's women left Rio with 10 medalists and the team title.
 
That Brazil final in freestyle was as much a mental test as a physical one, Donally said.
"It was against Brazil. I think I won like five-three. It was a close match, definitely could have been further apart, but I was just trying to be smart," she said. "And I was just so excited to get to run around with the flag. That's what I was looking forward to the entire day."
 
Now Donally is headed to Bratislava, Slovakia, for the 2026 U20 World Championships (Aug. 16–23), where she'll represent the U.S. at 72 kg. It's a step up in competition and, by her own account, exactly the kind of test she's been chasing. Her training block leading into Rio was anything but conventional as she was home in Montana working an internship for the summer, without a college practice room to fall back on.
 
"It was a hodgepodge," she said. "There wasn't a whole lot of wrestling opportunities, so I ended up just going to high schools and wrestling with high school boys that I wrestled with all through high school. I spent two weeks at the Olympic Training Center for prep, and then just wrestling at home whenever I could at open gyms. It was kind of frantic — I was very stressed about the whole training situation."
 
That patchwork preparation is exactly why she thinks Rio matters heading into Slovakia. International opponents, she said, "are a lot more heavy-handed" than what she typically sees in the college style, and having a tournament like Pan-Ams under her belt has taken the edge off going into an even bigger stage. "I think if I went to the U20 Worlds without going to Brazil, I would be extremely, extremely nervous," she said. "I'm glad to have Pan-Am games out of the way to prepare me for that, get through those nerves and know how to wrestle."
 
She's deliberately not setting a placement goal for Bratislava. "I don't really want to put a goal in mind there. I just want to wrestle the best that I can," she said. "I'm at the best in the world, that's crazy, and I want to appreciate that for what it is, instead of looking to force myself into these expectations. I think I always do worse when I have expectations placed on myself."
That mindset, she said, is the biggest thing carrying over into her junior season. "It's exposed a lot of my flaws in wrestling, which is good — I know what to work through now," she said. "And also knowing that I can trust in what I have and not switch up my style too much. What I have works. It's going to continue to work until I'm done wrestling."
 
Coach Mercado: "She's not the first, and she won't be the last"
 
Head coach Travis Mercado, who has built Colorado Mesa's program into a perennial national power since founding it in 2018, has watched Donally's international career unfold in real time and, by his account, watched her mindset change along with it.
 
He got a taste of just how far her college-season reputation lags behind her international one on the Pan-Am trip itself. "It was funny, a lot of the college coaches that were there were like, 'How did Gretchen do at NCAAs this year?'" Mercado said. "And I had to remind them she didn't qualify."
 
Mercado pointed to the 2026 World Team Trials in Spokane as the turning point. Donally had finished third there in each of the previous two years; this time, he said, he and assistant coach Grace Kristoff sat down with her beforehand to talk through what needed to change. His read wasn't about her skill set, it was about composure. "Going into world team trials, Coach Grace and I sat down with Gretchen and we had a little hard conversation," Mercado said. "Basically, it was, I don't want to sit at the podium in Spokane and have to console you about taking third place for the third year in a row and being an alternate again. We said, 'Here are some changes we need you to do,' and one of them was just be coachable and allow us to help coach you through things."
 
"I think that's where she faltered at the NCAA regional tournament, she got flustered and kind of ventured away from the game plans and the coaching we had," he added. "Being able to fix that, that's the biggest change."
 
That shift, he said, is what carried her through to a spot on the Pan Am team and two gold medals, from there, to a spot on the U20 World Team. Mercado said the results themselves weren't a surprise. "Her skill level, I wouldn't say anything changed," he said. "It was just a matter of believing in herself, knowing the skill sets that she has and the skills that she uses to win matches, and she utilized them to her fullest." He pointed specifically to her scrambling: "Things like running down attacks, she ran down attacks, and that was something that really helped her win."
 
Heading into Slovakia, Mercado said the coaching staff's focus with Donally has been on her par-terre defense, not conceding restarts or getting turned when she's on the bottom, and on finishing controlled positions rather than letting her off-the-whistle scrambles decide matches. "The thing we're really going to need to be focused on is being strong in our hand-fight, getting to her main control ties right away," he said. "That was something that really helped at Pan-Ams, getting right to that good control tie she has with her two-on-one, and utilizing the arm drag to get things moving. Par-terre defense is going to be something we have to be really strict and really stubborn on — not allowing anybody to turn her if she does get taken down."
 
For the program, Mercado framed Donally's summer as proof of concept. Colorado Mesa, he said, wants to be known for both ends of the sport at once, a team that competes for national titles at the collegiate level while also producing athletes who make U.S. World and Olympic Trials teams. Donally isn't the program's first: "We had an incoming freshman one year, Claire Dicugno, make a world team," Mercado said. "Alma Mendoza made a Pan-Am team in the very first year of the program and won a silver medal. Claire Dicugno won a silver medal at the Pan-Ams in '22. Marissa Gallegos qualified for Olympic trials and made the senior national team. Lorianna Piestewa made a world team last year but unfortunately didn't wrestle. So it's just a committed success to that pathway."
 
That track record matters for recruiting, Mercado said, but it matters just as much inside the room. "What I hope it also does for the program is help some of the girls believe that they can do it too. Why not me? Gretchen did it, why not me? It's not like, 'well, Gretchen did it,' it's, 'why can't I do this too?'" And when Donally won gold in Rio, the team noticed in real time. "If you saw our group chat, it was just blowing up — 'great job Gretchen, go girl,' all these words of affirmation," he said. "It was really exciting to see that while Gretchen was the one wrestling, the whole team was there behind her, cheering her on."
 
Donally will land back in Colorado with classes just getting underway and training sessions beginning later in the week. Both she and Mercado described Bratislava as a proving ground rather than a stopover. A strong showing at U20 Worlds would be the clearest evidence yet that the physicality and pace she's building internationally are already showing up in the room: sharper takedown finishes, tighter mat control, a wrestler that steps out on the mat with confidence.
 
Mercado said he's carrying a similar energy into the fall. "I hope her performance this summer really brings some energy to the program like, we can do this, we're all on the same page, we want to achieve high things," he said. "We're in the right place to do things and accomplish really high goals, whether it's an NCAA individual trophy, a team trophy, a world medal, Pan-Am medal, beach medals, all of it. You've already started to see that a little bit this summer with the girls training, and now with everyone back for classes, you can see that energy of excitement, especially having Gretchen getting ready for the world championships."
 
Donally, for her part, is trying to hold onto something simpler than a medal count. "I want to enjoy wrestling again," she said. "That is my whole goal, to not stress myself out and put too many expectations on it. I just want to enjoy the process, enjoy learning through the sport, and enjoy who I meet in the sport and who I become in the sport."
 
Donally wrestles for a U20 World medal in Bratislava, Slovakia on Aug. 16–23, then turns her attention to her junior season at Colorado Mesa.