This summer, a pair of friends from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex landed jobs in college coaching.
Rewind back to the 2019 UIL State Wrestling Championships; those same two wrestlers were part of the 165-pound state finals — Plano West’s Ashley Lekas and Trophy Club Byron Nelson’s Kaylynn Albrecht.
Albrecht was recently hired to be an assistant coach with Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Northeastern State in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, has hired Lekas to be a graduate assistant coach to coach Bryan Kenney.
The 2026-27 season will be the inaugural campaign for the RiverHawks.
The RiverHawks roster features a few Texans: Mariah Dillard from Azle via Wayland Baptist, Jasmien DeGuerre from Austin Westwood, Jamin Guilory from San Antonio Pieper, Scarlett Hillis from Melissa and Erin Marquez from Princeton. Kiley Chavarilla from Little Elm is a senior this year and has already committed to join the Division II school.
Kenney first met Lekas when she was wrestling at Plano West.
Lekas has recently graduated from Texas Wesleyan and was looking to move into coaching. She had been helping out Travis Clark with coaching wrestlers at All-American in Southlake and Keller. She’s been training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with Clark and helping coach the youth team and high school team in the club.
Lekas was a two-time NAIA National Champion wrestler, won a U23 national title and also a U.S. Open All-American following her standout career at Plano West. Lekas has wrestled at Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth, William Penn in Oskaloosa, Iowa and Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
She’s spent the past year training at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. In Colorado, she got a chance to reconnect with Albrecht, who was at the facility as well.
“We hung out a bunch and connected through faith and got to have a lot of different conversations about wrestling,” said Albrecht.
She has been doing wrestling camps and somewhere along the way, she said she found her calling. Lekas said that was not in the cards when she left high school and started college.
She had her eyes on going to medical school or becoming a physical therapist. She admits she didn’t know 100% for certain, but she did have one thing on her mind: she wanted to make a lot of money. Lekas admits she thought wrestling was a temporary thing for her because she knew there wasn’t ‘good money’ in coaching, so she set her sights on more.
“As I got older, I realized how much of an impact coaches had …,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much I would value that impact over just being a person that would be recognized or had a reputation of making more money.”
The epiphany came and she realized she wanted to be known for making an impact on people’s lives. She realized coaching goes well beyond those 1 minute, or up to 6 minutes, on a mat during a match.
She looked at her life and realized that coaches had laid the foundation of her life. They helped her beyond the mat. Sure, they created goals and helped with matches, but navigating life outside of the wrestling room means a lot more than the wins and losses.
“Having a coach that sees and wants the kids to succeed in their sport, but sees them for more than just an athlete, can change the whole trajectory of a kid’s life,” she said. “A kid can have the most resources coming to you, supportive parents or they could be in a home where they’re not supported and they’re not seen. You don’t know what type of kid is walking into the room, but you get to be that support system for them and be someone that they can count on.”
She hopes to bring lessons she’s learned from wrestling and now coaching to Northeastern State.
Lekas has been in a program where there’s been great coaching and she’s made jumps. She’s also been in rooms where someone was there in the coaching role, but didn’t help her improve in the sport.
“So I’ve experienced both. I’ve experienced having a lot, and I’ve experienced having a little, and that frustration makes me want to make sure that the people who really want to work hard and go far don’t have to experience having a little,” she said.
Lekas, despite her lengthy resume, didn’t start wrestling until she was 16 years old. Her parents thought she was joking when she initially told them she was going to try wrestling.
She was a dancer growing up and always had that dream most ballet dancers do — to make it big and make a career of the sport.
Then, the studio she trained at closed.
She remembered the Plano West coach at the time had recruited her earlier in the school year, but at the time she was a dancer. Lekas took sixth in the 2018 finals — in her first year wrestling.
By her senior year, she was 34-1 and was 68-5 in two years of high school wrestling.
In college, she won back-to-back national championships. In 2024, she beat Abby McIntyre in the finals of the 170-pound bracket. Lekas avenged a lost in the Heart of America Athletic Conference championship match by beating McIntyre, 4-2.
Lekas led 4-0 early and then held off a late charge – that needed a video replay decision — to secure her first NAIA title.
At Texas Wesleyan, she won the 180-pound title with a 12-2 win over Kelani Corbett from Missouri Valley College in the 2025 finals. Lekas outscored her opponents 43-2 at the national meeting.
Now, she hopes to develop the next generation of All-Americans and champions on the mat at Northeastern State.
“I’d say helping people achieve … I am very drawn to passion and I want to take them to where they want to go and use whatever resources that I can to help them get there,” she said. “I’m really looking forward to just seeing growth and transformation in people and seeing confidence grow.”
Clark said he is excited to see what Lekas can do in the sport. He coached her with Team Texas while she was in high school for USA Wrestling. He went to a gym to train a fighter and ran into Lekas at that gym.
She then started to help out coaching with him this summer and he worked with her on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, winning a No-Gi gold medal in her first tournament this summer.
“She is energetic, passionate and brings a level of positive excitement to the room every time she steps in it,” Clark said of Lekas. “This energy has had a positive impact on many of our wrestlers and grapplers through the gym. Especially our 9- to 15-year-old girls who train with her nightly. She is athletically gifted, as we have seen with her state and national wrestling titles. When she steps into that college room, she will instantly make an impact on that university and the girls she will be coaching. She not only talks about what to do and how to do it, but she leads by example. She is out front every day learning and gathering knowledge from as many people as possible. She is one of the most coachable and eager-to-learn wrestlers I have had the privilege of working with. She is going to take that knowledge and impact the next generation of girls just like she was impacted by so many coaches in her journey.”
