Peninsula’s Sonnen lost her dad to brain cancer. Then she became a star wrestler
Mira Sonnen grabbed her mom’s credit card and bought a few lottery tickets. Not the Mega Millions or the Powerball — no, these were longshots of a different variety. Sonnen, who carried a 4.0 grade point average at Peninsula High School, paid the fees and sent out college applications to some of the country’s most prestigious universities.
Stanford. Princeton. Purdue. Dartmouth. Harvard. Columbia University in New York City.
At the time, her mom, Margaret, was bedridden from complications due to Multiple Sclerosis (MS), which she was diagnosed with a couple years earlier. When she recovered, the ballooning credit card statement was a surprise.
Mira, ever the optimist, put a positive spin on the expense.
“We need some good luck,” she told her mom.
Margaret Sonnen couldn’t help but agree. She watched Mira, the youngest of her three kids, forced to grow up quickly in what should’ve been carefree years of adolescence. Margaret’s husband, Cory, called with news from a doctor’s visit in 2018, when Mira was in sixth grade.
Mira hardly ever saw her mom cry, so she knew something was terribly wrong.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s cancer,’” Mira said. “I was trying to think of the worst-case scenario, and I still couldn’t even think of brain cancer.”
Cory Sonnen was a bonafide tough guy — a former Pac-10 wrestling champion at the University of Oregon. Mira watched his health rapidly deteriorate as the cancer attacked his body. A surgery in the days following the diagnosis partially paralyzed Cory. A year or so later, a seizure was the beginning of the end.
Mira remembers the final days, all the family packed into the living room sleeping on mattresses on the floor next to Cory while he slipped away. He died July 19, 2020.
A STAR WRESTLER BORN
Mira Sonnen mostly played softball growing up, but watched her older brothers, Kel and Kylan, grow up wrestling. She remembers watching Kylan wrestle for Peninsula at the Mat Classic state wrestling tournament at the Tacoma Dome when she was a freshman. She was hooked.
It took a little convincing with her mom, but Sonnen turned out for the Peninsula High School wrestling team her sophomore year. She was starting from scratch, but credits wrestling partner Bailey Parker (also a state champion wrestler for the Seahawks) for getting her up to speed in short time.
Sonnen went from losing matches early in the season to winning matches late, culminating in a third-place finish at the Mat Classic state wrestling tournament in her sophomore year.
“I wasn’t even scared because I had literally nothing to lose,” she said. “No one expected anything of me. … When I did end up getting third, it was like, I don’t know, I just knew (Cory) would have been proud and I don’t think he would have expected that from me. … It was very meaningful.”
Peninsula wrestling coach Gary Griffin could tell it wouldn’t take long for Sonnen to become a factor.
“It was pretty early,” he said. “We started noticing that she was paying attention to how things operated. She wasn’t rattled by taking a loss.”
She journaled every night, writing down notes of different moves her coaches taught her, what she was doing well, what needed improvement. Her rise through the sport was swift; Sonnen went on to win individual state titles in the 140-pound weight class her junior and senior seasons. Peninsula also won the team title in 2024 and finished runner-up in 2025.
Wrestling and softball became emotional outlets for Sonnen, who not only carried the grief of her dad’s death, but has also been part-time caregiver for her mom, who suffered an MS relapse last year.
Mira spent a lot of time in the school counselor’s office, leaning on Peninsula’s staff for emotional support. She missed a lot of school to take her mom to appointments and hospital visits. Mira and Margaret’s relationship is complicated. At times, it’s a traditional mother-daughter dynamic. At other times Mira plays the role of caregiver. More often than not, they’re close friends, bonded by trauma and grief.
“What she has done, both publicly and privately, day in and day out, is extraordinary,” Margaret Sonnen said. “I’m deeply proud of Mira and her brothers.”
Griffin said they tried to make the wrestling room an escape from the death of her dad, who was also Griffin’s friend. He couldn’t say enough good things about Mira.
“She makes her teammates feel important,” he said. “She’s super humble. She recognizes she didn’t do it by herself. … She’s awesome, she’s driven, she’s kind, honest, mature.”
A BITE OF THE BIG APPLE
The lottery ticket cashed. Last spring, Mira saw an incoming call from a New York area code. She figured it was a spam call, which she usually ignores, but for whatever reason, she felt compelled to answer.
It was an admissions officer from Barnard College in New York City, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University. Amid the end-of-period bell ringing and ensuing commotion of shuffling students, Sonnen managed to make out the good news: she had been taken off the waitlist.
Sonnen was committed to wrestle at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, but the chance to attend Barnard and compete for the Columbia wrestling team was too good to pass up.
“I think I tried to hide my excitement a little bit so I could just talk to my mom about it more,” she said. “But I was really excited, though.”
She clicked with the school’s wrestling coach, Emma Randall, and after talking with her mom, decided on college in New York.
After everything she’s been through, her mom couldn’t be happier for Mira.
“The mental grit she has, to deal with stuff that a lot of adults haven’t had to deal with,” she said. “She had to deal with that at a very young age.”
Griffin, the wrestling coach, thinks the best is still to come.
“Her parents did an amazing job,” he said. “It’s hard to believe someone like her has more to give, but I really think her little ripple effect she’ll have on the world will be massive.”
