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Girl Power
Two Area Female Wrestlers Will Go to the Mat for Their Sport

Friday, February 12, 1999

By DURWARD BUCK
The Ledger

Three weeks ago, Sheila Devane was competing for a high finish in a wrestling tournament in Sebring. She had lost her first match but battled back through the consolation round and had a chance to place fifth in the 103-pound division. The Bartow High junior trailed her opponent, 6-4, and was the victim of a takedown in the third round. But she pulled a reverse and scored a pin with less than a minute remaining.

A rousing cheer went up among the 1,200 spectators, many of them high school wrestlers.

Devane acknowledged the applause.

"It was very nice," she said. "It shows me I have been accepted."

Devane is one of two girls in Polk County competing on varsity boys' wrestling teams. She fractured her left shoulder in a tournament at Lake Gibson and is out for the season, finishing 7-4.

At Auburndale, freshman Vanessa Colon wrestles at 112 pounds. She hasn't won a match but has been competitive, Coach Dennis Miller said.

"I wrestled this one guy at Kathleen, and I thought I had him pinned, but the referee didn't call it," said Colon, who will be competing in the Class 4A-District 9 District Tournament at Lake Gibson on Saturday.

There are two other female wrestlers at George Jenkins, Amy McDormond and Becky Friedlander, both freshmen. They work out with the squad but have not competed in a match.

Devane competed in an all-girl match in a dual meet in Sebring in January.

"The other wrestler weighed 125, but they asked if we would set it up," Miller said. "We did, kind of as an exhibition. Sheila was much faster, but she just gave up too much in weight."

The idea of girls wrestling on a varsity boys' teams is not new. Santa Fe Catholic had a wrestling squad 15 years ago that had a girl on it.

The number has increased to such a level that there is a national girls' tournament planned in Lansing, Mich., this summer.

The athletic abilities of the female wrestlers are as varied as in any sport. Some girls are willing but do not have the muscle mass to compete on a level with boys in larger weight divisions, Bartow Coach Dan Kratzer said.

"The ideal weight for a girl is 103," he said. "In the upper weights, the girls have not been strong enough in the upper body."

Miller said he had another girl on his wrestling squad at Auburndale in 1997, but she did not return this year.

"I guess it was grades," he said. "I haven't heard from her."

Auburndale's coach said he had five girls approach him before the season and asked whether they could form a girls' team.

"We just weren't ready for it," he said.

Devane and Colon don't take wrestling lightly.

"I'm serious about it," Devane said. "Even when I broke my shoulder in the match at Lake Gibson, I got up and finished the match. I'm already counting the days until I can start wrestling again. I'll be back next year."

Doctors told her she would need six weeks of recovery time. While she is recovering, she plans to run the 800 meters on Bartow's track team.

Colon has three more years to wrestle.

"I want to make it to state by the time I'm a senior," Colon said.

Said Miller: "She's tough. She doesn't quit; she keeps wrestling until it is over."

Miller said he makes the same demands of female wrestlers as he does of males.

"I don't change much," he said. "I sit down with the student and let her know what is going to be expected from her as an athlete and what she is going to be coming up against as a female in a male-dominated sport. I let all the guys on our team wrestle her as hard as anybody else."

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Girls Getting a New Hold on an Old Sport

(Gerald Martineau – The Post)
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 24, 1999; Page A1

Oakland Hills wrestler Dena Glisan adjusts her headgear during practice.

The two wrestlers took their places on the mat, crouched and, when the buzzer blew, sprang at each other, locking arms around necks, straddling legs, lying on top of one another, straining and sweating.

In six minutes, it was over. The loser, Howard County's champ in the 125-pound division last year, pulled off the protective head gear, letting a blond ponytail tumble down.

Dena Glisan, 17, of Oakland Mills High School, had been overpowered by Ben Hemler, 15, in a preliminary round of the county tournament Friday. But for Ben, it was a somewhat hollow victory.

"I can't really say I won, because I beat a girl," said Ben, a varsity wrestler at Howard's Centennial High. "But if I lost, I'd get a lot more heckling from people because she's a girl."

"It's a lose-lose situation," summed up one of Ben's teammates.

It's a situation being seen more often across the country as a small but growing number of girls is taking to the mats in high school wrestling – 1,900 at last count. Often the only girls on their teams, they're struggling to gain acceptance from coaches and other wrestlers and a shot at true competition in a sport still dominated by males.

They got into wrestling for the same reasons as boys: the opportunity for individual achievement in an intensely physical and mentally challenging sport. They train as hard as the boys, practicing diligently alongside them.

"It's just about the most competitive sport you can get into," Dena said. "It's not like you're using any equipment. It's your body. If you're the fittest, you'll come out on top."

But for many of the boys, the prospect of facing a girl grappler poses unavoidable teenage concerns about tangling with the opposite sex. Is it really okay to grab a girl in the heat of a match in a way that would by unacceptable under other circumstances?

"Thoughts will go through my head, like, whoa, I don't know if I should do this move with her," said Ben, a sculpted, wiry athlete who has beaten Dena twice this year.

Or consider Bryce Beckner, a 16-year-old from Patuxent High in Calvert County who lost to Dena in a tournament this year.

"I felt short," he said. "I felt dumb. Everybody razzed me. They said if they'd ever lost to a girl, they'd never wrestle again."

Coed wrestling is prohibited altogether in South Dakota and Wyoming, and the Lutheran High School Association of Greater Detroit, out of concern for decency, requires its boys to forfeit matches against girls.

"There are a lot of other sports that girls could participate in," said John Ferguson, wrestling coach at Moorcroft High School in Moorcroft, Wyo. "Wrestling is, I hate to say it, a mano-a-mano sport. . . . With today's society, we might be asking for more problems than we would want to get" by allowing girls to wrestle with boys.

Where girls are permitted to do so, coaches often have qualms, and many allow their players to forfeit if they're uncomfortable grappling with a girl.

"We were always conscientious about that because in wrestling normally you would be grabbing and using certain moves against males that would obviously graze against certain parts in females," said Fred Kim, who coaches wrestling at Montgomery's Quince Orchard High.

Kim said he doesn't hesitate to demonstrate with his male wrestlers such moves as a grapevine, where one wrestler wraps his legs around his opponent's legs. Other coaches say they refrain from demonstrating such techniques as a crotch lift. Kim said he'd never touch a girl on the team, for fear of invoking a harassment complaint.

"It's a hands-on sport," Kim said. "I'd hate to get in trouble just by coaching."

Despite their initial qualms, Kim said, male wrestlers often get past the sex issue once they see female teammates working hard to master the sport.

When he coached at Seneca Valley, Kim had to order the boys to practice with Elizabeth Bonnell, a 5-foot-2 grappler who tips the scales at just over 100 pounds.

But today, the 17-year-old junior practices single-leg takedowns and half nelsons with the rest of the guys. Elizabeth's own teammates rib her good-naturedly but have accepted her as an athlete.

"Like at a tournament, [a teammate] was sitting next to me and would say, 'Liz, you smell like a girl.' Or if I spit: 'You're not supposed to spit. Or burp.'"

A former football team water girl, she took up wrestling when her mother nixed the idea of her going out for football. Other girls she'd meet in the locker room, mostly basketball players, used to laugh at her for going out for wrestling. "This year, they're like, 'I give you mad props,' like 'You're really cool. I could never do that.'"

In real matches, however, the tone often changes. Guys in the crowd would heckle her opponent, screaming "Sexual harassment! Rape!"

"They'll call [her opponent] a sissy, a wuss, because they're losing to Liz, and she'll just be schooling them," said 18-year-old team captain Drew Fergus, feeling her left biceps as she popped him one in the abdomen.

Opponents don't cut her slack because she's a girl; they'd rather lose by default, said Elizabeth, who has three wins this year – all forfeits.

"This one kid my freshman year, he really didn't want to lose to a girl, so he just put me in headlock and, you know, smashed my head on the floor as hard as he possibly could," she said. "I'm sure he gave me a concussion my freshman year."

There are signs, though, that girl wrestlers are gaining ground. Last year, the first national all-girls tournament, in Michigan, gave girls a chance to extend their season and compete among themselves. Dena placed first in her weight class in that competition.

Hawaii, which has more female high school wrestlers per capita than any other state, created all-girl teams in 1993 and holds state tournaments for them, as does Texas. The University of Minnesota at Morris has the only all-women's college wrestling team in the country. And there are plans to include women's wrestling in the 2004 Olympics.

Olivia Ocampo, who has won a wrestling scholarship at the University of Minnesota at Morris, competes with her teammates and against other women from wrestling clubs in the United States and college teams in Canada.

A native of Oxnard, Calif., the 4-foot-10, 101-pound Ocampo won two national titles last year, one for high school wrestling and one junior title for freestyle wrestling.

She looks forward to the day when high school girls' teams are commonplace. Advocates say that's the only way the sport will really take off.

"If you want to promote girls' wrestling, you wrestle girls against girls," said Robert Frey, who started the country's first all-girl high school team at Hawaii's Radford High in 1993. "If you want to discourage girls' wrestling, you wrestle girls against boys."

Doug Reese, who runs the girls' wrestling program at the University of Minnesota, said girls compete on more equal ground when they wrestle each other because they cannot safely cut as much weight as boys and men.

A girl will start having irregular menstrual periods if she drops below 12 percent body fat, but boys can get down to 5 percent during the season without significant health impact. As boys get older, they also tend to be stronger than girls, since they have more muscle mass, he said.

But what girls lack in strength they can compensate for in technique and flexibility. Dena, for instance, is like a human Gumby, her opponents said.

"She's got a crazy Granby roll," said Ben, referring to a pretzel-like twist-and-roll move that is difficult to defend against. "She's impossible to pin."

Dena is disappointed with her 6-13 record this year, which included one forfeit. She had hoped to do better. But she's looking ahead to the second annual national girls' tournament, where she's hoping to repeat last year's feat.

And who knows, she said, maybe one day, the Olympics.

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Seeking A Few Good Women

Why haven't more women integrated into wrestling at Wilcox?

by Serena Nguyen

No female athlete has ever endured an entire season of wrestling at Wilcox High School. Female students interested in wrestling are left with only one option: to enroll in the ever-so-intimidating wrestling program with the opposite sex.

Family, friends, and predisposed ideals about women's athletic abilities can come into conflict for female athletes seeking to pursue wrestling. Woody Freitas, a wrestling coach at Wilcox, believes, "In some cases, certain families do not feel comfortable in letting their daughters compete [against] males." Wilcox varsity wrestling coach Ted Pettigrew agrees, "Females I have coached for wrestling get pressured by families and friends into quitting. Most [females] don't get support for wrestling."

The belief that women are disadvantaged against male opponents and pressure from family and peers has prevented many female athletes from integrating into wrestling. "My father discourages the idea of his daughter wrestling other males," says freshman Chrissy Garcia. Garcia choose to participate in women's soccer at Wilcox after experiencing the difficulties of wrestling early in the season. "He [father] would be okay with me wrestling with my own gender, but he was really uncomfortable with me wrestling males." For Chrissy Garcia, family wasn't the only obstacle that she had to face. "My friends did not support me in wrestling," Garcia explains. "They made fun of me wrestling and about my body disadvantages."

In most cases, informal contact with the male gender would prevent curious female athletes from participating in this physically demanding sport. Joser Reynozo, a freshman at Wilcox with three years of wrestling behind him states, "There aren't a lot of female wrestlers because there are not many women to compete against in the entire [wrestling unit]." It has been suggested that a woman's frame is disadvantaged against male opponents. "In general, a woman's upper body strength is not equal to the male's upper body strength," inputs coach Freitas. Chris Greenman, the head wrestling coach at wrestling at Santa Clara High School agrees. "Men and women are biologically different. Men are stronger in the upper body." Josh Schneider, a first year wrestler at Wilcox describes the awkwardness of wrestling opponents of the opposite gender, "I tend to be more careful when I wrestle a woman, as in grabbing a woman in a way that would be considered sexually inappropriate." Coach Greenman understands. "Some of the male wrestlers were afraid to wrestle the females in fear of hurting them in the beginning of the season," he explains. "There's a lot of touching [involved in wrestling] that can bring up a lot of legal concerns [like] sexual harassment."

With the support of friends and family, there are a handful of successful high school female wrestlers in the bay area. Amanda Buckman completed a season of wrestling at Santa Clara High School, and is now back for a second season. "When I just started out last season, they [the male wrestlers] seemed kind of scared," Buckman noticed. "They feared of touching me in a certain way." Inspired by her father, a former high school wrestler, Buckman has the full support of both her parents. "My father shows me moves [in wrestling] and encourages me to wrestle. My mom wasn't sure if I could last, but my dad knew I could do it." Buckman benefits from the support of her family, friends and team. "My friends were astonished and very surprised," Buckman recollects. "But this did not stop them from supporting or believing in me." "As the season progressed, the team accepted the females on the team," Coach Greenman recalls from last season. "I was kind of surprised myself." "I feel very comfortable with the wrestling squad," Buckman shares. "I feel like my teammates are my family."

Amy Head, senior, is a first year wrestler at Wilcox. She is the only woman who remains of the six women who originally signed up this year. "In the beginning I wasn't relaxed wrestling guys," admits Head. "Now I feel more comfortable. I'm starting to know the other wrestlers and the sport itself. At first, my father was enthusiastic in me joining wrestling. After hearing that I was to wrestle guys, he got nervous and uncomfortable. My mother tried to get me into a more 'feminine sport'. But now, she's willing to accept that wrestling is what I want to do." Discouraged by her family, Head is displeased by her friends' attitudes towards women wrestling. "My friends thought I was crazy and some still do," Head irritably remarks. Although family and friends doubt, their skepticism does not restrain Head's determination to be a wrestler. "Wrestling is a personal challenge," Head believes. "I feel upset that my family does not support me fully. But when the season is over, I can prove to my family that wrestling isn't such a bad sport for girls after all."

Wrestling continues to be a very difficult sport. With the success of a few female athletes, the hope of more women participating in wrestling increases. "Wrestling is the hardest sport you can ever do," Buckman describes. "You have to push yourself to the end. If you can do wrestling, you can probably do any sport."