Mota-Pettis wrestles on her own terms

Xochitl Mota-Pettis wanted a letterman’s jacket.

She could have bought one online. She already owned one from high school. But in her mind, a letterman’s jacket was something you earned, and that idea is what finally pulled one of the country’s top senior-level women’s wrestlers into college wrestling after years of telling anyone who asked that she wasn’t interested.

“It seems pretty silly to everyone when I tell them,” said Mota-Pettis. “But in my head, I’ve always viewed it as something you have to earn.”

The detour has worked out. Last March, Mota-Pettis won the 124-pound title at the inaugural NCAA Women’s Wrestling Championships in Coralville, Iowa, becoming the first national champion in Quincy University wrestling history. She did it in her first semester with the Hawks, and she did it with a torn labrum.

That college title is just one line on a long resume. Mota-Pettis is a 2023 Pan American champion and a 2023 U.S. Open champion. She placed fifth at the 2023 U23 World Championships, and has twice qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team Trials. In 2023, she wrestled 2016 Olympic champion Helen Maroulis for a spot on the U.S. senior world team. Three years before that, she pinned two-time senior world silver medalist Alli (Ragan) St. John.

Quincy head women’s wrestling coach Jeffrey Haley didn’t need long to explain what makes her special.

“She’s just a beast,” said Haley. “She’s very agile, very athletic. When it comes to wrestling, her hips are phenomenal. She never really breaks from bad position. And she’s cool, calm and collected.”

Mota-Pettis grew up in Humble, Texas, about 30 minutes from Houston, “depending on traffic.” For a while, she wanted to be a football player. Not for the game itself, but for the part she watched from her elementary school across the street, when players grabbed each other and tried to throw one another to the ground.

“In my mind, they looked like gladiators,” said Mota-Pettis. “Batman was my favorite hero-slash-vigilante growing up, so I’ve always had a liking for combat sports.”

Her father had wrestled, though he rarely talked about it. He did tell his kids that if they ever took up a combat sport, he would coach them. In middle school, Mota-Pettis stumbled onto a Greco-Roman highlight reel on YouTube and saw bodies flying through the air.

“I was like, ‘Oh, you can do that?’” said Mota-Pettis. “He said, ‘Yeah.’ So I had to find a club nearby that had wrestling.”

She lost every match at her first freestyle tournament, all of them on step-outs, and admits she initially hated freestyle. That changed once she figured out the scoring. There were few girls wrestling in the area, so she wrestled boys almost exclusively, and she kept doing so at Klein High School. She finished her high school career with a 199-8 record, two Texas state titles and 2018 Junior National titles in both freestyle and folkstyle.

Then she did something unusual for a wrestler with that resume. She skipped college.

“I feel like there’s a misconception that I don’t like school or I don’t like learning, but really, I just didn’t want to wrestle for anyone,” said Mota-Pettis. “I’ve seen a lot of people face burnout, not just in wrestling but in college sports in general, and I didn’t want that to be me. I wanted to retain my love for the sport.”

She stayed in Texas, trained with Rise RTC and was coached by her father, whom she calls “basically my head coach.” It didn’t take long for the senior-level wrestling world to learn her name. At the 2020 Senior Nationals, one of her first senior-level events, Mota-Pettis pinned St. John with a left-handed headlock at 57 kilograms on her way to a runner-up finish. A month later, she won a U23 national title.

“Honestly, it was a shock for everyone else, but for me and one of my coaches, it wasn’t really that much of a shock,” Mota-Pettis said of pinning St. John, now the head women’s wrestling coach at Iowa State. “If you’re in bad position, you’re either going to get away with it or you’re going to get punished. In that instance, I guess I went in as the fish. Everyone expected me to lose. But she was in bad position, and I took advantage of it.”

Mota-Pettis was quick to point out that St. John evened the score less than six months later, winning 9-2 at the 2021 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.

“Later on, we wrestled each other at Olympic Trials, and she beat me,” said Mota-Pettis. “But it’s wrestling. Anything can happen.”

She placed second again at the 2022 Senior Nationals and took bronze at the 2022 Pan American Championships. In 2023, she won the U.S. Open at 57 kilograms and a Pan American title in Buenos Aires, Argentina, earning a shot at Maroulis, the reigning world champion, for the world team spot.

That series turned into a test of patience. It was originally set for Final X in Newark, New Jersey, in June, but Maroulis received a medical delay a day or two before Mota-Pettis was supposed to fly out. The series was moved to Aug. 12 at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“A lot of people talk about periodization and training specifically for a date,” said Mota-Pettis. “I was doing a lot of that at the time, and it threw a wrench into my plans. I just had to be ready to wrestle wherever.”

Maroulis won the series in two matches to make her 11th senior world team. Mota-Pettis said she didn’t treat the Olympic champion any differently than anyone else.

“I kind of view everyone the same,” said Mota-Pettis. “I just plan to wrestle my game. I don’t stay too focused on what other people do. I know what I want to get to.”

Haley first noticed Mota-Pettis at the Missouri Valley Open two or three years ago, when his assistant coach, Jackie Ghent, recognized her. The two had grown up training together in Texas. Haley introduced himself and made his pitch, and Mota-Pettis told him she wasn’t really a fan of school.

A year later, she was wrestling collegiately for Missouri Valley. The jacket was the reason. On a campus tour, she spotted a vintage letterman’s jacket and made a deal to wrestle one semester to earn it. She opened the 2025 NAIA Women’s Wrestling Championships at 131 pounds with three straight technical superiorities, pinned No. 2 seed Mercy Adekuoroye of Wayland Baptist in the semifinals and fell 5-3 to Dickinson State’s Jumoke Adekoye in the finals.

The jacket never came through.

“The deal fell through,” said Mota-Pettis. “So I was like, ‘You know what? The deal was only one semester.’ Since I’d done a stint in the NAIA, I decided, ‘You know what? Why not do a semester of NCAA and just continue?’”

Haley got the call he had been hoping for.

“She explained that it hadn’t been a great experience and asked if I still had an opportunity for her,” said Haley. “I said, ‘Absolutely. Let’s make something happen.’”

Haley admits he wondered at first how an introverted, established senior-level athlete would fit into a young program. He didn’t wonder for long.

“There was a huge respect factor,” said Haley. “Xochitl was somebody they looked up to because they knew her accolades. But at the same time, she’s a very humble person and willing to help anybody.”

The season wasn’t smooth. Mota-Pettis narrowly missed her weight descent to 124 pounds early on, so she bumped up to 138 pounds to face North Central’s Claire DiCugno, a 2024 national champion who went on to finish as the NCAA runner-up at 138 pounds. At the NWCA National Duals in January, Mota-Pettis built an 8-0 lead in the first period before DiCugno rallied for a 9-8 win, the only loss of Mota-Pettis’ season.

“Claire is a good wrestler,” said Mota-Pettis. “I feel like everyone knows that, and if they don’t, Claire is a good wrestler. She’s also a cool person. You’re not going to win every match. It emphasized something I already knew, that sometimes I need to be a little more defensive instead of just going, going, going all the time.”

Not too defensive, though. Asked to describe her style, she chose “active.”

“I don’t like to have boring matches,” said Mota-Pettis. “It’s the whole reason why I wrestle. If I wanted to do something gentler, I’d probably do cup stacking.”

She quickly added that cup stacking is harder than it looks. She has tried it.

The bigger setback came during a dual against Grand Valley State, when Mota-Pettis got caught in a funky position and her shoulder was wrenched as she bailed out. She knew immediately it was torn. She still won the match.

“I didn’t need a doctor or trainer to tell me that,” said Mota-Pettis. “Later, after the season, I got an MRI, and yeah, it was torn.”

Quincy pulled back on her training and her schedule. By March, the game plan was simple: stay in good position, score when the openings come and avoid getting extended.

It worked. The third-seeded Mota-Pettis opened with a 12-1 technical superiority over Simon Fraser’s Laura Alcantar Soto, pinned Eastern’s Savannah Witt in 4:33 in the quarterfinals and blanked Colorado Mesa’s Lorianna Piestewa 10-0 in the semifinals. In the finals, she handled McKendree’s Shelby Moore 10-0, ending the match with 11 seconds left in the second period. She finished 11-1, and Quincy placed ninth in the team standings in only the program’s fourth year.

Haley said she was the same person she always is before the biggest match of her college career.

“Before the finals, we were back there talking and chatting,” said Haley. “She was making jokes and we were laughing and having a good time. There wasn’t any pressure to it. She won a national title with a torn labrum. That shows you the resilience and toughness of this student-athlete.”

The injury cost her the summer. Mota-Pettis went to Las Vegas planning to win the U.S. Open and get back to Final X, but she learned about a week and a half beforehand that the labrum was torn. She decided against both competing and surgery, and watched from the stands instead.

“I thought, ‘What if I weigh in right now and just decide to wrestle?’” said Mota-Pettis. “But I had to keep telling myself, ‘No, you’re injured.’ You have to think about your longevity, not just as an athlete but as a person and an adult.”

Away from the mat, Mota-Pettis calls herself a “professional hobbyist.” She reads more than anything. She plays story-driven role-playing games with her brother, juggles, has gotten back into jump rope tricks and recently picked up a banjo, her favorite of the instruments she has tried. She is quiet until she isn’t.

“I’m not outgoing at all,” said Mota-Pettis. “I still find myself reverting to the old XM-P, where I don’t know what to say. But I can also be a bit of a yapper nowadays. Either I’m silent or it’s hard to stop me from talking.”

The nickname started with her father, who wrote “X” or “XMP” in his texts. She added the hyphen between the M and the P herself.

Mota-Pettis is taking online classes this fall and plans to return to campus in January. She plans to compete at the Bill Farrell Memorial next month, and Haley expects her back in the Quincy lineup in the second semester, likely at 131 pounds. She doesn’t expect to wrestle in college beyond this season. Her main goal is to make a senior world team, and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles are on her radar. She was born in California and still has family there.

“It would mean a lot just to be able to represent my country, and doing it in the United States would be even better,” said Mota-Pettis. “It’s like coming home, you could say.”

She hopes people take one more thing away from her story.

“When I refer to wrestling, I just say ‘wrestling,’ period,” said Mota-Pettis. “Most of the time people don’t call it ‘men’s wrestling.’ They just call it wrestling. At the end of the day, an athlete is an athlete, and everyone deserves respect.”