This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism.

The backstage is scattered with bags, water bottles and weights. Shirtless men in colorful spandex outfits pump iron while waiting for their turn to enter the ring. An operator watches a live feed of the match outside, waiting to cue the wrestlers that it’s their time to fight. 

Jeanette Langston waits to hear her name. She’s watched some of the feed, trying to get a feel for the crowd’s energy and what they’re responding to. 

But she’s anxious. In a few moments, she will need to transform into someone else. And she’s not quite there yet. 

One of her teammates approaches, looking to joke around and chat. At first, Langston recognizes this man as a friend. Then it strikes her: In a few moments, this man will be her opponent.

No — this man is the enemy. 

A chauvinist pig. A paper-thin patriarch. A toxic relic. He’s everything that is wrong with men, with the world. An embodiment of the systems of power that are keeping women down and tearing the world apart.

She looks up in silence and glares. The man is at first surprised, then angry. She’s angry, too. 

Now she’s there. The transformation is complete.

She’s no longer Jeanette Langston. She’s Benita Jean. And she’s ready for this match.

Benita Jean Shows Off Her Muscels at Kamikazes Club Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jeanette Langston

A lesson from Darth Vader 

When Langston began wrestling, she said she didn’t imagine her persona as being someone particularly aggressive or mean.

“I’ve always been the goody-two-shoes girl, right? I’ve always been the one who likes to follow authority,” the Salt Lake City wrestler and artist said. “And so when I first got into it, I thought I wanted to be the hero, the baby face.”

Langston said she quickly realized that in the wrestling world, defining a personality is not so much about being the “good” or “bad” guy as it is about creating someone the audience can “get on board with.”

“If I’m the heel and I’m able to just run across the ring and, you know, just smash into the other guy who is in the corner, and that gets a reaction to where they’re just so mad at me for doing that, then I feel good,” she said. “I feel like I’ve accomplished it.”

Wrestling is more than a narrative involving the two participants in the ring. The audience is just as integral to how the story plays out. Langston said she first recognized this when she and her son attended a wrestling event that had a “Star Wars” theme. 

One of the wrestlers strolled out to the “Imperial March,” dressed as the iconic villain Darth Vader. Langston’s son, an ardent “Star Wars” fan, began to cheer and raised his hand for a high five as the wrestler walked by.  The wrestler turned, looking directly at her son, and exclaimed, “You suck, kid!”

Langston’s son was devastated, fighting back tears. In that moment, both mother and son were seething with hatred for the wrestler. They booed. They screamed. And that was exactly the reaction the wrestler wanted. 

As she began designing her wrestling persona, Langston decided she should be everything she had always wanted to be, but had never had the chance to be. To gain a firmer grasp of these traits, she asked her closest friends why they were friends with her and what made them want to be her friends. 

“A lot of the stuff that they were saying was, like, I was kind of passive, that I was easy to get along with because I was agreeable,” she said. “For a lot of my life, I’ve really wanted to speak up and say when I don’t like somebody, but I was told if you can’t say something nice, you don’t say anything at all. And so then I thought, ‘You know what? I want to be more of that person in the ring.’”

Benita Jean was born.

Langston’s journey into wrestling began when a friend brought her to a WWE Smackdown show in Salt Lake City. Langston was familiar with the sport, having grown up watching it with her brothers. Her favorite wrestler was “Macho Man” Randy Savage— known to wrestling fans for his 10 world championships and his friendships and feuds with Hulk Hogan. Fans also know his signature catchphrase, “Ooooh yeah,” as he snapped into a Slim Jim jerky snack. Langston loved his schtick.

Watching the sport as an adult, though, gave her a perspective she hadn’t considered when she was younger. 

“I was immediately just, like, this is not just hilarious. This is fascinating because you have to be in good shape to be able to do these stunts and to get thrown on your back and then be able to get back up and do it to the other guy. They don't look like they’re winded, but they’re out there putting in some serious effort.”

Benita Jean Poses with Young Fans Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jeanette Langston

Becoming more than ‘eye candy’

After the Smackdown, Langston introduced her two sons to pro wrestling, showing them clips online. Soon after, Langston took one of her sons to a local event. There, she was approached by the organization’s owner, Manny Smith, who noticed Langston’s athletic build and enthusiasm for the performers. 

Smith said Langston’s muscular look — she calls it “carved beef” — would be sure to draw crowds. He invited her to join the team.

There was precious little training involved, although Langston said she understood. 

“If you’re a woman who has the right look, then you get the matches,” Langston said. “And then, because wrestling is pretty much a dance, then the other person can help to guide you through those moves so that you don't have to be an expert. You don't necessarily need to have years and years of training to go in and create a good show and a good match. And so that's a good thing. That’s what a well-sculpted athlete can bring to the sport.”

She acknowledged this attitude has a flip side, with women in wrestling becoming highly sexualized. To combat this, Langston said she has to know her boundaries and draw a line. Saying “I’m not comfortable with this,” up front, has proven to be a powerful tool for her, she said. 

Langston said she has also had to be aware of when she’s being told lies about her performance, rather than honest feedback so she can improve. At times, it’s been a battle to prove she’s more than just “eye candy.” Comments like, “It must be nice to be a woman in this industry if you’re going to get all these different bookings,” have been more frequent than she would like.

“I feel that extra pressure that I need to prove to you that I’m working really hard and I’m working just as hard,” she said. “I’m putting in those reps at the gym and I’m making sure that my lifestyle is on par with what it is that I’m achieving out here.”

Despite these struggles, Langston said she encourages women to enter the sport if they desire to harness their “inner beast” and become new people in the ring.  Pro wrestling, she said, has given her the chance to disprove the stereotypes and conventions others place on her. 

“There are things that society says, like, [that] a 38-year-old woman, a mom, whatever, she doesn’t do that, she doesn’t say that,” Langston said. “She doesn't dress that way. She doesn’t act that way. She doesn’t interact with men or other women that way. I say, ‘Yes, she does.’”

Benita Jean Speaks to the Audience at Dia De Los Muertos Event in Ogden Utah Photo Credit: Courtesy of Michael Serrano

‘I got mad… then I got creative’ 

Langston said she has always wanted to entertain people, a desire that perhaps came from growing up in a family of eight kids, where it was a fight for parental attention. Back then, she would always try to make people laugh, finding fulfillment in evoking an emotional reaction. 

Now she does it in a different way. 

She recalled that at one match, the audience was “packed in like sardines.” Langston said she noticed one woman with a particularly bad seat, where her view of the ring was almost completely covered. In an effort to give her a great experience, Langston approached the woman and interacted with her as Benita Jean throughout the event. Once it was over, the woman gave Langston a huge hug and asked for pictures. 

Langston and that woman, Stephanie Osuocha, are now friends.

“Having a friend that is in this male-dominated field feels one million billion percent better,” Osuocha said. “I know you have to overcome a lot in the entertainment industry and in a very athletic one at that, so it’s very, very inspiring.” 

Langston said she is still getting used to that sort of power. 

“For so long, I believed that reality was the box that people around me put me in and told me ‘This is where you stay. This is what you do, and this is how you believe.’ And I really thought that was reality and I believed it and I trusted it,” she said. “And then as soon as I allowed myself to think outside the box, I got mad, and then I got sad and then I got creative. …”

“I think it’s important for everybody to be given permission, right?,” Langston continued. “Like to be allowed to think about a different reality than what they are experiencing because then they can open their minds to different solutions to problems that arise. It is an immersive experience. That’s what I’m going for.”

And when she gets it, it’s not just as Benita Jean. It’s as Jeanette Langston, too.   

Graham Jones wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah for a capstone course focused on women’s sports. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.

Soloau Te’o knew a shot at a national title was possible.

“We’ve been working to get into the Final Four for a couple years,” said Te’o, who plays for the Utah Vipers women’s rugby team. “We made it pretty close.”

The best the Vipers had done during Te’o’s 11 years with the team, though, was breaking into the round of 16 at various levels of national competition. But finally, 16 years after the club was created, and having ascended to the highest division of club rugby in the United States, everything seemed to be coming together for a championship season.

In 2024, the Vipers went undefeated in Rocky Mountain Rugby league play and swept the Gulf Coast Super Regional, earning a spot in the USA Club Rugby Division 1 semifinals. After a commanding win in the semis, the opportunity to take the national title was finally in reach. 

But that’s where their momentum stalled out. 

Now, Te’o and her team have another chance. They’ll face the Houston Athletic Rugby Club on Friday in Indianapolis. A win there will set the Vipers up for a potential championship rematch with the Northern Virginia Women’s Rugby Club, which will face the Minneapolis Metropolis Valkyries in its semi-final match.

And the way Te’o sees it, her team has “no choice but to win.” 

Photo Credit: Payton Mckee Rugby is a contact sport, so physicality is a natural part of the game, as Apa’au Mailau takes on a player from the Seattle Rugby Club at the Pacific Super Regional Championship. The sport is where many players come to “let it all out,” according to Vipers player Soloau Te’o.

‘Just trying to learn the game’

Head coaches David Shelledy and Olive Ahotaeiloa founded the Vipers in 2009, aiming to give teenage girls in and around South Jordan a shot at playing a sport that most high schools in Utah don’t sponsor. After a couple years, though, the coaches realized their team was the last one many of those girls would play for. 

“There’s a lot of them that don’t go to college, and so they can't play on a college team,” Shelledy said. “And the younger girls were done with high school and they wanted to keep playing.”

So, Shelledy said, the organization decided to shift its demographic to help adult women keep the sport in their lives. While many of the team’s players have athletic backgrounds, some didn’t grow up playing the game much, if at all. 

“It was a new sport to me,” said Tamasailau Tavita, who joined the Vipers in 2014. “I didn’t even know there was even a D1 level… I was just trying to learn the game, and that was my main focus.”

Tavita said she didn’t even consider that playing in a national championship could be a possibility back then. And as recently as two seasons ago — when both the Vipers’ senior team and its D2 affiliate, the Salt City Slugs, went winless in Rocky Mountain Rugby play — it didn’t seem like it was in the cards.

But last year something shifted.

The Vipers outscored their opponents by an average of 33 points during the regular 2024 season.  That energy continued in the semifinal match, where 18 seconds after kicking off to the Pittsburgh Forge, Utah stripped the ball at the 22-meter line, and Vaimalo Manuo took a rumbling run through the center of the pitch for the game’s first score. The Vipers never trailed, and their 33-21 victory earned them a spot in their first national title game against Northern Virginia.

‘It sucked, to be honest’

Although the Vipers had overpowered their competition in the regular season, they’d picked up some injuries along the way — and their semifinal game brought even more. 

“It sucked, to be honest,” Tavita said. “We didn’t have a full squad at the time, and a few of us were playing a little injured because of our first game.” 

The Vipers went into the title game in Round Rock, Texas, with two fewer players on their bench than their opponents. Tough luck came down on them again in the 20th minute, when Breauna Nez was helped off the field by team trainers. 

Even with short numbers, Tavita said, “I just think everybody went out and gave it their all.”

But that wasn’t enough. The Vipers didn’t put any points on the board until the final minutes of the first half. Another 40 minutes of rugby later, they’d fallen 44-12.

The Vipers are an all-women rugby team, ranging in age from 18 to 52, according to Head Coach David Shelledy. The team was established over a decade ago to give players the opportunity to play at a higher level outside of schooling.

‘It was like a 360’

Tavita said the shortfall in the championship finals was hard — especially because the title wasn’t the only thing on the line in competition.

“A lot of us are paying to play,” she said. “We have a few sponsors, but they’re like sponsoring gear, not so much like funds — and that’s where we struggle a lot, is funds to raise as a team.”

That hurdle aside, though, Tavita said things will be different when her team arrives in Indianapolis.

In the midst of a national spike in players for USA Club Rugby, the Vipers’ team leaders said they now have the numbers they need. Tavita thinks the team’s “hunger” has changed since they came so close to the national title and walked away empty-handed. And Te’o agreed. 

“Everybody’s mindsets just kind of changed. It was like a 360 immediately after that loss,” she said. “It was like, ‘Let's just get back into that mode, get in the gym, do what we got to do on our offseason.’”

Shelledy noticed the change, too. Now, he said, his players understand what it takes to make it to and win the finals. “We just have a really good team this year, a good solid team going into it,” he said. “They’re excited, and they’re really driven to get there, so I think they’ll take it this year.” 

Shannon Woolley, president and match secretary of the Vipers, said the physical nature of rugby hooked her to the game. She said it gives her the space to show up and be “aggressive” without judgement.

‘Rugby is there’

Te’o said it was hard to come home without the win — and so this year, she said, her team is planning on “taking everything.” 

But for these women, it’s not just about the title and the trophy.

“Rugby for everybody. It doesn’t matter your age, doesn’t matter your size, doesn’t matter what you look like, what job you have, whatever,” Te’o said. “We want it to stick around forever, and this is our way of contributing to the sport.”

Te’o said many of the women on the team are moms, and almost all of the players have other full-time jobs. For many of them, rugby is an outlet to take time for themselves and find support in a tight-knit sisterhood. 

“Where life gets in the way, rugby is there,” she said. “I hope it just means that we can grow the sport, so more and more people will look into it, look into us, and want to participate, and want to bring the same thing that we bring to our community.”

Tavita also said that winning the national title is, in no small part, about showing other women in Utah what’s possible.

“The bigger picture is recruiting more and more women and younger women,” she said. “There’s so many. There’s so much talent. They can carry on the legacy, as some of us vets are able to just either coach or step down. I mean, it’s carrying on the legacy of the Vipers.”

The Utah Vipers are soliciting donations to support their travel to Indianapolis via Venmo (@ladyvipersrugby) and Cashapp ($ladyvipersrugby). Elle Crossley wrote this article through a collaboration with the non-profits She Plays Here, Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune. 

This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism.

The first time that University of Utah basketball assistant coach Dasia Young saw Lindsey Kirschman, the reaction was visceral.

“I was like ‘dang, she’s jacked, like she’s ripped,’” Young said. 

It’s not easy to create a body that looks like that. It’s even harder to maintain it at 37 years old. But Kirschman loves a challenge.

Now, as she ends her third season as the director of sports performance for women’s basketball at the University of Utah, Kirschman’s challenge is keeping the team in shape. That includes daily workouts, lifts, conditioning, or anything else she thinks the athletes need.

The Utes finished the regular season with a 22-7 record, good enough for sixth place in the Big 12 in their first year in the conference. In the postseason, they scored a No. 8 seed in last month’s NCAA tournament and lost in the first round to Indiana.

Much of the team’s work happens when no one is watching. In the summertime, college basketball players are restricted by NCAA rules that govern how much they can practice on a court, so that’s when they spend the most time strength training to prepare for the upcoming season.

The workouts can be grueling. But Kirschman said she won’t ask anything of a player she wouldn’t do — or that she wouldn’t be excited to do.

“A lot of my hobbies involve physical discomfort,” she said. “My best days are the days where I am just physically exhausted at the end of them.”

That’s what assistant coach Jordan MacIntyre said the players need, too. 

Utah women’s basketball strength coach Lindsey Kirschman instructs Grace Foster during the team’s morning lift (Photo Credit: Natalie Newton)

“We play a really fast, up-tempo style of basketball, and we have to be able to get up and down the floor and be in our best physical shape to play the brand that we want to play,” MacIntyre said. “That is so much of a credit to the work that she puts in with people outside of our season.”  

All of that effort, MacIntyre said, permits the team “the ability to play the style we want to play.” 

Kirschman’s days have early starts. She wakes up around 4 a.m., reads, writes in her journal, goes on a run with her dog, works until 2 p.m., does her own workout, and then goes to bed around 9:30 p.m. She’ll often go to the athletic facility at 4 or 5 in the morning to do the workout that she’s planning on putting her athletes through later that day.

“She actually knows what she’s talking about, which is nice, because, you know, sometimes strength and conditioning coaches don’t look like what they preach,” Young said.

Even though she has often already gone through the workout, Kirschman doesn’t hesitate to jump in alongside the players. At a team lift in late February, for instance, she was stretching, planking and demonstrating different exercises to athletes who needed help. The workout culminated in Kirschman pushing a sled that carried Alyssa Blanck, the Utes’ 6-foot-2-inch sophomore forward, across 20 yards of turf while the team cheered on the sideline.

“I know that they see her own drive. She can have them do whatever in their workouts because they know she’s doing it, too, and she’s probably done it already before we’ve done it,” MacIntyre said. “That absolutely motivates them and she has such an element of respect because of it.”

Strength coaches at the collegiate and professional levels often have degrees in athletic training, kinesiology or sports medicine. Kirschman, on the other hand, earned her bachelor's degree in environmental science at the University of Washington, where she also competed in track and field.

She then began graduate school for rangeland management. During this period, she started coaching at a high school in her free time and found herself pulled back to the world of sports.

Lindsey Kirschman, Utah women’s basketball strength coach, joins the team during their morning workout. (Photo credit: Natalie Newton)

“I would sneak out every afternoon to go volunteer coach at a high school in town,” Kirschman said. But soon she thought, “Why am I sneaking around to do something that I could just do for my job?”

She switched programs to start studying education. After finishing her master’s program, she taught science and coached track and field, cross country, and strength and conditioning at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“I think a lot of my own coaches have been role models and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to be a coach, because as an athlete I thought about who has had the biggest impact in my life in a positive way and it’s always coaches,” Kirschman said. “I wanted to be that for other athletes.”

Kirschman taught and coached for eight years in Colorado. Eventually she began thinking about how she could take herself to the next level. Being a high school strength coach often means having a lot of teams to oversee, and Kirschman grew tired of working with that many athletes at once.

“I was coaching before school, teaching all day, coaching after school, coaching all summer, but I had hundreds of athletes,” she said. “You can only do so much with each one individual athlete when you’ve got 300 more coming.”

She found a new opportunity at the University of Central Arkansas, as the school’s assistant strength and conditioning coach. Kirschman took a 50% pay cut — and was still training hundreds of athletes — but the prospect of a new mountain to climb was enticing.

“The challenge of that was appealing to me. I wanted to be held accountable to the highest standard possible, and have that risk of, if you're not good at your job you're going to get fired,” Kirschman said. “It’s kind of hard to fire someone at the high school level. … I want to see if I have what it takes to hang.”

Kirschman’s teaching experience has been a benefit.

“She comes with a lot of different experiences that a lot of other strength coaches don't have… she does a lot of teaching of exercises,” Utah women’s basketball athletic trainer Christina Jones said. “She has all of those fundamentals down very well and can connect with the athletes and really hones into the teaching aspect.”

After one season in Arkansas, the University of Utah women’s basketball program hired Kirschman. In Utah, she finally got her wish of working with athletes on an individual level.

“First time in my career that I only had one team to work with,” she said. “I went from working with 300-plus athletes to working with 14, and that’s been a huge blessing and learning experience.”

Her one-on-one work with athletes doesn’t go unnoticed. Jones noted that Kirschman is especially focused when it comes to injured players. Any time the team is on the road, she gets up early with the athletes who are injured to put them through a workout in the hotel gym before breakfast.

Lindsey Kirschman flexes with the Utah women’s basketball team at the university training facility after a workout. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Lindsey Kirschman)

“I think it’s a cool thing that she does, and the ability to adapt and be able to do that in the hotel,” Jones said. “It’s hard to do that when your other teammates aren’t doing that when you’re hurt.”

It’s that attentiveness that gives Kirschman one of her greatest strengths as a coach. Those who work with her say she has an innate kindness, an ability to make connections with people, that lifts her to the next level. Anyone who works with or plays for Kirschman will sooner or later be likely to receive a valentine in their locker, a note, a treat she’s baked, or a moment where she genuinely checks in because she cares.

“She’s probably one of the most, if not the most, kind-hearted people I’ve ever worked with, let alone met,” MacIntyre said. “She really is someone that cares to be there for other people, and wants her impact to be so much more than just teaching people how to get stronger.”

Kirschman gets the best results from people, Young said, because she has their best interests at heart.

“Nobody’s ever going to listen to their teacher if they don’t like them or if they don’t believe in what they do,” Young said. “She mastered that perfectly – to get people to do hard things and enjoy it at the same time.”

Kirschman said she knows that players respect her because she is a good strength coach but, she said, “people love me because of the impact I have on their lives and in their heart and that I have a relationship with them.”

That love can be leveraged into the sort of trust she needs from her athletes to get them to do things they might not do otherwise.

“She just always made sure that we didn't settle. I could be curling 25s and she’s like, ‘Babe, you can definitely go to 40.’ I’m like, ‘I could but do I want to?’ and she’ll come pick up those 40s and hand them to me,” Young said. “I can do more. That’s probably what I took away from her the most: that I can do more. Whatever that is.”

Natalie Newton wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah for a capstone course focused on women’s sports. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.