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By: Ken Weingartner, Sports Writer
01/11/2007
Joe Dougherty isn't a scientist, but he knows chemistry.
After several weeks of work in the South Brunswick High wrestling room, the lab, so to speak, the young Vikings have combined elements in a way the longtime coach believes favorable.
"I'm a firm believer in team chemistry and the chemistry thing is starting to come together," Dougherty said. "That needs to happen first before anything else can happen. There are so many new kids in the room; the mixing of all those different personalities can be difficult. Our mission statement as a team says people are different and our goal is to understand those differences and accept them. They're starting to grasp that concept.
"They know that other people are counting on them; they're pushing each other. Granted, the varsity kids are the ones we put on the mat, but they're only a product of what the rest of our team does. We're all counting on them to put us in the right direction. They're representing all of us, not just themselves, on the mat."
South Brunswick had a lackluster win over Elizabeth last week, followed by a talk from the coaching staff. The result was the best practice of the season so far. Then, the next day, South Brunswick won two of three matches in a quad meet with Piscataway, Franklin and John F. Kennedy to improve to 6-2.
"There were a lot of good things that I saw," Dougherty said. "The way they gelled, the attitude on the bench, them knowing what the team score was and knowing what they had to do. Overall, I was pleased with what transpired. It was a major step in the right direction."
Ryan Smith won three matches at 140 while Dave Amrhein recorded three pins at 189 as the Vikings beat Piscataway, 44-30, and Franklin, 54-24. South Brunswick lost 47-27 to JFK, which is ranked third in Middlesex County. Evan Nathanson (215/285) had two pins and a win by forfeit.
In addition, Colin Preacher had two pins at 119 and Manny Ortiz got two wins at 130, including a one-point victory with a takedown in the final seconds against Kennedy. Malcolm McQueen also registered two triumphs at 171.
"For Manny, that was his first real action on varsity," Dougherty said. "He won the one match with a takedown in the last 10 seconds, and that's what we drill and preach at the kids, so we were pretty happy with him. Colin hasn't had a great deal of success to this point, but we're high on him. He works hard in the room and wrestles hard, it's just a little confidence thing."
Sarah Dorsay had a pin at 112 against Franklin, but that was the only action she saw on the day. She received forfeits in the other two matches, which concerned Dougherty.
"It's unfortunate; she works hard and is a varsity wrestler," Dougherty said. "If you have a kid wrestling varsity and forfeit just because she's a female, that doesn't cut it. I don't know if it's going to be a pattern, but if it does become a pattern I'm going to have to address it with the GMC (Greater Middlesex Conference). It's not right. We'll see what happens."
With the two victories Saturday, the Vikings surpassed last season's win total of four.
"I'm not looking at that; I'm looking at the overall perspective of us moving in a direction that's positive," Dougherty said. "The kids are responding real well to the adult leadership in the room. I like going to practice."
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Some 300 girls wrestlers to invade Vintage High for ninth annual tourney
By MARTY JAMES
Executive Sports Editor
Thursday, January 11, 2007
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Audrey Garza, bottom, spars with Matthew Bresee during Tuesday’s Vintage High wrestling practice. Garza is ranked No. 5 in the state for her weight class. |
One of the fastest growing sports in the country is high school girls wrestling.
Year after year, it continues to increase in popularity, with more and more girls from throughout the state taking to the mat in the winter months.
“The girls have made great strides in what they do,” said Vintage High School coach Jim Lanterman. “They have taken it to heart and they really have done well for themselves.”
“It’s amazing how tough they are,” said Shae Farace, a Vintage assistant coach whose daughter, Heather, is on the team. “They go all out and they don’t pull back. It’s a lot tougher sport than people really realize.”
Wrestlers from California, Nevada and Oregon — as many as 300 in all — will be at Vintage for the ninth annual ASICS Napa Valley Girls Classic. The two-day tournament starts Friday at noon and resumes Saturday at 9 a.m. in the school’s gym. Vintage, ranked 12th in California at the end of last year, is the host school.
“The people who watch it will just be very impressed with the skills and the agilities that these girls possess right now,” said Lanterman, the tournament director, who will have a large contingent of wrestlers from Vintage entered. “It’s amazing. They’ve come a long ways. They listen, they pay attention, and they try their hardest.”
The ASICS-sponsored tournament is one of the largest in the country, with wrestlers competing in 14 different (98, 103, 108, 114, 118, 122, 126, 132, 138, 146, 154, 165, 189 and 235) weight classes based on weight in a double-elimination format. Team scores will be kept and medals will be awarded to seventh place.
“The tournament’s always been about the girls,” said Rob Lanterman, a Vintage assistant. “I think we embraced the sport as a whole in the beginning, where a lot of people were struggling with it. Since then, it’s just grown from there.”
The tournament, the first National High School Federation event for girls in the U.S., was founded by Lanterman and Carl Murphree, a former VHS and Napa Valley Wrestling Club coach who is now the head women’s wrestling coach at Missouri Valley College.
“This is where you have to be on your game,” said the Crushers’ Audrey Garza, who has placed in five tournaments this year. “People just look forward to this tournament. I hope that everybody gets a chance to use what they’ve learned.”
College coaches and recruiters are expected to be on hand, looking for those experienced and talented wrestlers that can perform at the next level.
“The girls wrestling circuit in California just keeps getting stronger, and there are turning out to be more and more collegiate scholarship opportunities out there,” said Jim Lanterman, who is assisted by Bob Musante, Rob Lanterman, Yvonne Lanterman and Shae Farace. “There’s going to be some fantastic wrestling going on.”
Three former VHS wrestlers — Maika Watanabe, Kayla Chambers and Michele Querin — wrestle for Missouri Valley. Jessica Hsieh won a U.S. Girls Wrestling Association national title representing the Napa Valley Wrestling Club a few years ago. At least seven major colleges offer women’s wrestling as a scholarship sport.
“I think people will be surprised at the level of competition, as the girls get out there and they really battle hard,” said Rob Lanterman. “The girls are really technique oriented. You see real accurate, technical wrestling.”
Vintage will compete for the team title, with the Crushers fielding a large team, many of whom are brand new to the sport.
“All are showing real promise,” said Jim Lanterman. “We’ll get stronger as the season concludes at the end of January and surprise some people.
“The girls are really coming out in numbers. Almost all of them are at every practice. It’s a young team. They have a keen sense of what’s going on. They enjoy the tournaments that we go to. The program is getting nothing but better.”
Vintage has already been to six tournaments — often times leaving town early in the morning and arriving home late at night on the same day — and will also go to the CIF Northern California State Championships Jan. 19-20 at Liberty-Brentwood and the California Girls Invitational Jan. 26-27 at Hanford West.
“They’re excited and ready — very much so,” said Shae Farace. “They’re pumped up. They’re ready to get it going.
“They show a lot of confidence, strength and technique. Whether we come out on top or we finish in the middle, their attitude’s great. Like I say, they all stick together.”
Those going to the U.S. Girls Wrestling Association NorCal Championships (March 3-4 at Springstowne Middle School-Vallejo) and the USGWA National Championships (April 1-2 at Churchill High of Livonia, Mich.) will represent the Napa Valley Wrestling Club.
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Crushers technically sound and aggressive
By MARTY JAMES
Executive Sports Editor
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Heather Farace, ranked ninth in the state at 118 pounds, jogs before practice. |
Heather Farace can’t wait until Friday rolls around.
The Vintage High School junior will be on campus, but she’ll be excused from attending her classes, which include algebra II, Spanish III, college prep chemistry, history, and language arts.
Instead of being in the classroom, Farace will be in the school’s gymnasium, competing in the ninth annual ASICS Napa Valley Girls Classic, which is being hosted by Vintage. It’s a major two-day all-girls wrestling tournament featuring high school athletes from throughout the Bay Area, Northern California, Nevada and Oregon.
“It’s a huge tournament,” said Farace, the Crushers’ captain. “There’s a lot of good competition. It’s good for the team and everything. It’s a great experience to be there. You get to meet new people from all over. It can teach you new things. You get to understand what’s going on and how tournaments are run.
“It’s going to be hectic. But it’s going to be fun, really fun.”
Tournaments don’t come much bigger than the Napa Valley Girls Classic, which is sponsored by ASICS and has a double-elimination format. It runs from noon until 7:30 p.m. Friday and continues Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with wrestling taking place on three mats. There are 14 weight classes, ranging from 98 pounds to the heavyweight division. Individuals will medal to seventh place and place to eighth.
“The competition is intense, because a lot of great state champion girls come here,” said Farace.
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It’s the oldest prep girls tournament in the country, is the largest of its type and considered one of the marquee events in girls wrestling. Past attendees have included numerous state and national champions as well as several members of Team USA and the Olympic team.
Last year’s tournament drew 250 wrestlers. Organizers are expecting at least that many this year.
“It’ll be exciting,” said Farace, who wrestles at 118 pounds and was ranked No. 9 in Northern California at the end of last year’s season. “We have a lot of new girls this year, and a lot of them are in their first year. They’re all excited to wrestle and be in it. They’re all doing great this year. I’m very proud of my team. I’m proud to be captain of it.
“I have a lot of faith in this team. They don’t give up. They’re aggressive. They’re having fun.”
Said Aguayo: “It’s like a family.”
The Vintage girls team — which consists of Abra Saunders, Audrey Garza, Stephanie Garza, Megan Morton, Jean Rabaino, Sarah Michalek, Kayla Hudler, Chelsi Aguayo, Rebecca Medeiros, Alexandria Soto and Melissa Cortes-Garcia — will be joined by wrestlers from Napa and Justin-Siena, making for a large contingent of local entrants. Samantha Gardner and Alyx McChensey will represent Napa, and Cecilia Jojola and Luisa Jojola will represent Justin-Siena.
“It’s a big tournament with a lot of girls and a lot of high ranked people coming here, and everyone’s competing for a top spot,” said Aguayo, who wrestles at 126 pounds. “I’m going to try my hardest, be aggressive and work hard in practice.
“It’s an honor to host a tournament this big and to have people from so far away come here and wrestle.”
Vintage was sixth out of 24 teams at the NorCal Twilight Classic in Vallejo and fifth in a 22-team field at the Cougar Invitational at Newark Memorial High last week.
“We only have one senior this season, so next year we’re going to have one of our strongest teams in years,” said Vintage coach Jim Lanterman, the tournament director. “This team is working hard and trying to improve as quickly as they can. They have really bonded well.”
Garza, ranked fifth in the state, is having a very good year, placing first at the NorCal Twilight Classic, second at the North Bay Ladies Classic at Piner-Santa Rosa, second at the Cougar Girls Invitational, third at the Roger Briones Women’s Wrestling Invitational in San Leandro, and third at the Castro Valley Girls Classic.
“I’m really glad with what I’m achieving this year,” said Garza. “I’m pretty proud of what I’ve done. There’s always room for improvement.”
Napa coach Nacho Franco is pleased with the development of Gardner and McChensey, both first-year wrestlers.
“They’re definitely wrestling well,” Franco said. “They’re tough.”
Cecila Jojola is a “very technically sound wrestler,” said Roger Bubel, Justin-Siena’s coach.
The tournament will award two most outstanding wrestler awards as voted on by coaches and referees.
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Girls grapple with barriers, but make way into wrestling
January 11,2007
JOSH BALL
DAILY NEWS STAFF
Hello ladies!
Welcome to high school wrestling.
High School girls are no longer keeping stats or cheering on their boyfriends. They are taking on the guys and breaking the gender barrier — slowly but surely — in high school wrestling.
Dal Tomlinson didn’t take a Tom Hanks-type approach to girls playing softball when five Dixon High School females came out for the school’s wrestling team.
It was a bit weird for the second-year coach, but instead of backing away from the idea, he embraced it,
“I welcomed them,” Tomlinson said. “They wanted on the team, they did everything I asked of them and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Perhaps it is best described as making history.
Sophomore Misty Tatonetti didn’t buy the stereotype of female spectators being in the stands or behind the statistics table.
“It was something I wanted to do, and girls have been empowered to believe that they can do things just as well — if not better than the guys,” Tatonetti, who kept score for the Bulldogs last season, said. “I wanted to be a part of the team, so I joined.”
But the transformation to infiltrate a boys’ game came with its skeptics.
“It was a bit different,” Tatonetti added. “I was so nervous walking into the first day of practice. It was tough; the preparation was much more difficult that I had anticipated.”
But Tatonetti, who finished tied for third in last Saturday’s Onslow County Cup at Richlands High School, adapted. She is also on track to win 20 matches this season, a first in Dixon High School history.
Brooke Rowland, a junior who wrestles in the 112-pound class, is confident that female wrestling will continue to grow in eastern North Carolina, despite the fact that they must compete against males, many of whom have more muscle mass and agility.
Strike that. These girls don’t mind going up against the guys,
And, in some cases, females are standing atop a once-regarded male dominated sport.
Last February, Michaela Hutchinson of Skyview (Alaska) High School became the first female wrestler to win a high school state championship. The runner-up in 2005, Hutchinson broke free with 15 seconds in the match to notch the win. She finished the 2006 season with a 41-3 mark, including 33 pins.
Women’s wrestling has evolved since its debut nearly two decades ago. In 2004, the Olympics introduced women’s wrestling as a sport and a number of colleges have formed teams since then.
Still, only two states — Texas and Hawaii — recognize female wrestling as a separate sport.
“I think we deserve to have our own sport,” Dixon’s Brooke Rowland said. “It’s what we deserve, and I think having our own sport would increase the number of participants.”
In California over 16,000 girls participate in high school wrestling, just 7,000 shy of the 23,000 males, according to the Southern Inland Press-Register.
Obstacles of equality
It’s a gender war out there for both male and female high school athletes.
In some circumstances, girls are the subject of criticisms from opposing coaches and competitors. Males often feel reluctant to wrestle females because of the clutching and grabbing involved, not mentioning the compromising positions of an average match.
It puts both the female and male students at a disadvantage.
Dixon High School Athletic Director Homer Spring, a former wrestling coach, said he remembers a tournament where he had a female wrestler involved in a tournament in Virginia Beach where a private school “refused to wrestle her because the head master said he would pull his money from the school and program.”
“The boys and girls each have a valid argument,” Spring continued. “It’s just something the sport is going to have to deal with during this time.”
Spring, who coached the first female wrestler in the area (Rebecca Felshaw) in 1989, said that opposition was “sporadic” in his time as coach.
A growing trend
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Newton Wrestling Club members claim two titles at Concordia
Wrestlers also take two titles at Atchinson, one title at Excelsior Springs
PUBLISHED: Thursday, January 11, 2007
Sunday, Darian Gonzalez won the U.S. Girls Wrestling Association Ex-Games Open Tournament in Excelsior Springs, Mo., finishing 3-0 with a pin and two decisions to win the elementary division at 103 pounds.
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Two girls and a mat make history, as simple as that
BY TIM LEIGHTON
Pioneer Press 1/11/07
Eighth-grader Elissa Reinsma of Fulda/Murray County Central seemed unmoved Wednesday at the news she had made history. The 103-pound wrestler has her eye on a bigger piece of Minnesota prep sports history.
Freshman Natalie Rutt of Jackson County Central was nonchalant, too, saying it was "kind of cool'' to own a piece of history, which she and Reinsma achieved Tuesday night in the southwestern Minnesota town of Jackson, when they became the first Minnesota girls to wrestle each other in a varsity match.
Reinsma, who has a 15-6 varsity record, broke open the match with a three-point surge in the third period and won 7-2. Reinsma said the only other time the two had wrestled each other was four years ago during a five-minute warm-up at a youth girls state tournament in Kimball, Minn.
"The crowd was going pretty crazy, especially when she got a takedown on me,'' Reinsma said. "I was wrestling a little bit lazy. When she pulled to within 4-2, I had to tell myself to get going. It's kind of neat for it to be a first, but I'm thinking about something else later on.''
Becoming the first girl to qualify for the Minnesota State High School League's state tournament, perhaps?
"You've got it,'' said the 5-foot-2 Reinsma, who is ranked fourth at 103 pounds in Section 3AA.
Rutt, whose brother Travis is No. 1 at 160 pounds in Class AA, was surprised, then excited, when JCC coach Randy Baker sent Natalie out to the mat to open the dual.
"I was hoping to get a chance to wrestle her,'' said Rutt (2-1). "After the match, I was disappointed in myself. I think I could have wrestled better.''
Did knowing you were part of history ease the pain of losing?
"Maybe a little bit,'' said Rutt, who is 5 feet 1.
JCC, ranked No. 2 in Class AA, won the dual 29-27, giving Baker his 297th career victory.
Baker thought a lot about having Rutt wrestle Reinsma. His reasons: to give top 103-pounder Cooper Moore a break because of match counts and the fact that he already had defeated Reinsma this season, pinning her in the championship of the JCC tournament.
"Wrestling is about learning and challenges,'' Baker said. "When I decided that Cooper wasn't going to wrestle, Natalie was the next person in line. She has composure, handles stress well and is a competitor. When I was thinking of putting her out there against (Reinsma), I thought maybe it would be a first.''
Howard Voigt, the high school league's director of information, confirmed Wednesday that the match was indeed a first in Minnesota.
"I didn't know it had the chance of happening until I saw Randy send Natalie out,'' Fulda/Murray County Central coach Dan Blankenship said of the historic match.
The significance of the match wasn't lost on the Minnesota wrestling community.
"I would love to see Minnesota get into girls wrestling,'' said David Senstad, a rankings editor for The Guillotine, Minnesota's wrestling newspaper. "Other states have it; why not Minnesota? I would like to see (this match) as being a first step. This was a positive thing for wrestling.''
Said Reinsma: "I would like to see it again, too.''
