RATS! I THOUGHT THERE WAS CHOCOLATE IN THERE. The women's wrestling squad scrapped its way to third place at the nationals. Pictured from left: Jessica Fitzgerald, Katrina Huszarik, Jessica Belchos.
News
For women wrestlers, strength gives pride
Thursday Mar 8 14:30 AEDT
Sonika Kaliraman remembers how her father, Indian wrestling legend Chandgi Ram, used to share newspaper articles among his daughters to inspire them with stories of women doing well in different fields.
One day he showed them a couple of clippings, and said: "This is what you girls are going to be like."
His three daughters were elated, looking at a picture of Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra who was crowned Miss World in 2000.
"I was so happy, I thought he's going to put us in modeling," recalled the six-foot Kaliraman, 23, wearing a grey shirt, black lycra pants and a bandage on her sprained ankle at her father's wrestling training camp in New Delhi.
But her dad pushed forward two other pictures of Laila Ali, daughter of boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who was winning boxing bouts in 2000, and south Indian Karnam Malleswari, who won an Olympic gold in Sydney for weightlifting.
Even though she grew up in a wrestling camp, Kaliraman remembers being horrified, thinking she would end up unmarried, and with nothing to show for her sporting life but broken bones.
But at 72 kilograms (158 pounds), she is now one of India's leading female wrestlers and has won championships in neighbouring Haryana and Punjab states, where the sport is adored.
"I couldn't have got a better opportunity," said Kaliraman, who says an Indian wrestler can make almost 14,000 dollars' prize money in a good year.
In India, sport can also be a ticket to a better life, with government agencies and the police forces keen to give good athletes jobs to improve their sports teams.
"Winning feels great. How to stop yourself from getting beaten up no matter what. That's wrestling. It's do-or-die, beat or be beaten," said the young wrestler.
She went to the Asian games at Doha, and though she didn't win there, another Indian female wrestler, Geetika Jakhar, came away with a silver medal.
Kaliraman now hopes to make it to next year's Beijing Olympics after women's wrestling became an Olympic event for the first time in 2004.
The Wrestling Federation of India says it has been promoting the women's sport more in recent years, following the lead of the Swiss-based International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles.
There are now about 200 professional women wrestlers in India, the Indian body said, compared to 1,000 men.
Kaliraman, who loves competing, says the sport transformed her from a timid teenager into someone who can intimidate men into silence.
"In our communities, girls are taught to stay at home, to be scared, as if you are something to be eaten up," said the heavyweight wrestler.
"Now I am so frightening, no boy dares to say a thing to me. This is a rough-tough game and your mind gets rough and tough."
As she and her sisters participated in bouts in Haryana and Punjab, where mud wrestling among men has long been a popular village sport, families would flock to see the famed wrestler's daughters.
And other girls began to ask how they could take up the sport. Many of the nine or 10 girls staying at Chandgi Ram's camp on the banks of the Yamuna say their parents supported their choice.
"In Haryana everyone knows Chandgi Ram. I heard that his daughters do it and he had a wrestling camp," said short-haired Kamlesh, 22, whose husband also lives at the camp but does not wrestle.
From 4:00-7:00 pm every evening, as the sun filters through a large ramshackle room with mats on the floor, the girls, wearing T-shirts and track pants, perform warm-ups before doing paired combat, as male coaches supervise.
During the training session, Chandgi Ram, who is now in his seventies, sits outside in front of a red Hanuman Temple, dedicated to the vigorous monkey god revered by Indian wrestlers.
"We want medals. If girls can win medals then let's train girls," said Chandgi Ram, matter-of-factly, about his decision to begin training women at his camp.
"In India there's opposition for women everywhere. But we have to go forward."
Sudesh, a 14-year-old from Haryana, said that she had faced some criticism for being a wrestler, though not from her parents.
"Older people get more upset but girls are doing well in it," said Sudesh, who has been training for two years. Unlike many Indian girls, she is far from thinking about marriage.
"Not 'til I bring some medals."
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Topsail Youth Wrestler joins state team
/www.wilmingtonstar.com 3/7/07
One of the newest members of the North Carolina Girls Wrestling team is Kelcy Gilliard, who is also a Topsail Youth Wrestler.
The Dixon Middle School eighth-grader was invited recently to compete as a member of the North Carolina squad in the National Girls Wrestling Tournament. The event will take place later this spring in Michigan.
Kelcy is one of 20 North Carolina girls selected to represent the state.
She was the first girl to earn a medal in the Onslow County Middle School tournament, where she also received an award for Best Individual Match.
The young standout also wrestles on the Dixon Middle School team, amassing a 4-3 record. She competes in AAU tournaments with the Topsail Youth Wrestling program.
On the way to the state team selection, Kelsy earned a gold medal Feb.17 at the Girls' East Coast Nationals in Wake Forest.
The Topsail Youth Wrestling club is looking for sponsors for Kelsy's trip to the nationals. Those interested can e-mail topsailyouthwrestling@yahoo.com.
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Western wrestlers grapple for the Pipe
Len Caballes and Stephanie Ramsay
Thursday, March 8, 2007
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RATS! I THOUGHT THERE WAS CHOCOLATE IN THERE. The women's wrestling squad scrapped its way to third place at the nationals. Pictured from left: Jessica Fitzgerald, Katrina Huszarik, Jessica Belchos. |
Every week, The Gazette recognizes an athlete or team who’s had a particularly successful match or season. This week, the lucky recipients are wrestlers Katrina Huszarik, Jessica Fitzgerald and Jessica Belchos.
After winning the Ontario University Athletics Wrestling Championships by defeating the six-time defending champion Brock Badgers, the women’s wrestlers advanced to the Canadian Interuniversity Sport Championships, receiving several medals.
The squad placed third overall. Fitzgerald and Belchos nabbed bronze medals while Huszarik placed sixth. The trio recently stopped by The Gazette to discuss bar fights, the WWE and high-school coaches.
When did you start wrestling?
HUSZARIK: I did a lot of sports in high school. I didn’t start wrestling until my last year at high school. I was actually on the hockey team in my first year at Western; I didn’t really like the hockey so much, so I decided to join the wrestling team.
FITZGERALD: [Huszarik and I] went to the same high school and in our last year we had a super-cute coach....That same year so many girls started wrestling.
How do you handle the pressure of competing at the OUA and CIS levels?
HUSZARIK: It’s pretty tough with school and everything, but I love the feeling of getting into a match. It kind of takes the pressure off when you win. It makes everything worth it.
BELCHOS: I’ve just been in so many tournaments that they all feel the same now. I just do the same thing with every single match and I just hope to win.
Are you a multi-sport athlete or is wrestling your main focus?
FITZGERALD: Wrestling is my main focus; I’m not very skilled in most other sports. (laughs)
BELCHOS: I play on the Canadian rugby team and the Western varsity rugby team.
Have you ever been in a bar fight? Did you kick ass?
HUSZARIK: I’ve been a spectator, but never been in one. I’m always the one breaking up fights.
FITZGERALD: I’ve tried, but my team is good at keeping each other out of trouble.
If you were a WWE wrestler, what would your persona be?
HUSZARIK: My nickname was Bonecrusher, so that would be my persona.
FITZGERALD: I don’t think I’d have a very good WWE persona — I’d be pretty boring.
Any interesting injuries?
FITZGERALD: I was thrown off balance and landed on a spectator and got my leg mangled.
BELCHOS: I was thrown and landed [with my arms behind my back] and tore muscles in my back and neck.
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Girls Wrestling Means More Politically Correct Craziness
By: Gregory J. Sullivan, The Bulletin
03/08/2007
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News of sexual confusion and chaos emanating from the fetid ideological swamp of feminism is continuous: The New York Times reports that girls are now participating in increasing numbers in high-school wrestling programs with and against boys. A comparable ideological idiocy is found in the advent of another feminist contribution to sexual chaos: coed dorm rooms on college and university campuses.
The tone of The Times's reporting on girls in wrestling, normally so welcoming of egalitarian novelty, captures the weirdness of this situation: "Wrestling may be the ultimate contact sport, and it can be a startling sight, teenage boys grabbing girls' thighs, girls straddling boys, boys riding girls' backs and trying to flip them onto their backs. For the most part, girls who want to wrestle - and they are slowly moving into the mainstream -must practice with, and compete against, boys."
As Rod Dreher, perhaps the most interesting newspaper columnist (he writes for The Dallas Morning News) on cultural and religious matters these days, avers, allowing girls to wrestle against boys is "an idea so spectacularly dumb it could only have originated in a culture that denies essential nature in the name of egalitarianism." He insightfully continues:
"[]I'm just an armchair psychologist here, but it strikes me as really dumb and dangerous to have teenage boys working out their competitive aggression groping and grappling with teenage girls. Boys at that age are in the grip of something natural that's more powerful than they can understand, and they live in a culture that gives them virtually no help in restraining and channeling those impulses into something constructive. Strenuous athletic endeavor is one traditional way of working out those tensions, of sublimating them. And now feminist egalitarians are putting males in the position of being aggressive and physically intimate with their female peers, in a situation of dominance ... or ... humiliation."
Dreher is making his cogent case based on the nature of boys, but that is not the sort of argument that the sexual egalitarians who run these athletic programs accept. They hold the reality-denying view that boys and girls are interchangeable, essentially without a basic nature and thus malleable to social-engineering enthusiasms. In a short time, the train wreck that this notion represents will become obvious. Until then, sexual confusion prevails in wrestling programs throughout the country and, more distressingly, in the maturing minds and bodies of the young boys and girls on whom this nonsense is visited.
In an effort to accommodate the disordered sexuality and psychological afflictions of homosexual and "transgendered" (i.e., cross-dressing, transvestite or transsexual) students, some colleges and universities have quietly allowed coed rooming arrangements in dorms for a number of years. More recently, about 20 colleges and universities - including Swarthmore and Wesleyan - have expanded it to all students. "It's the final frontier in the decades-long march away from gender separation in college dorms, hallways, and even bathrooms," according to The Christian Science Monitor.
The treatment of students as one undifferentiated mass of hedonists hardly reflects the mission of a college or university, whether religious or secular. Indeed, all notions of sexual modesty and restraint, which are essential to establishing civility and maintaining human dignity, are lost in this setting, with women the biggest losers. "If women aren't respecting themselves in the way they dress and the way they act, then men aren't going to necessarily feel the need to do it either," Meghan Grizzle, a Harvard student, has correctly written in connection with this problem.
The rejection of basic sexual differentiation in living arrangements at colleges and universities is a rejection of human nature in favor of the ideology of egalitarianism. These institutions are not doing any favors for these students who live in a social and sexual world of unreality for a short time and then move into a world where the hey-man-lighten-up-we're-all-the-same-here jive is (at least for the time being) unacceptable.
Our understandings and assumptions about the sexes are in chaos because of feminism's war against human nature in order to establish egalitarian fantasy. The complicated understandings about the sexes - their major differences, their fundamental complementarity, the complexity of sex - are utterly lost under this oppressive reign of political correctness.
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Cumberlands Team To Beat At Women's Nationals
Summary:
The defending national team champions return three individual champions and will be the team to beat at this weekend's National Collegiate Women's Wrestling Championships
FOREST GROVE - Sometimes reputation, size and experience make all the difference in competing for a national title, and the No. 2 ranked team in North America has all three coming into this weekend's National Collegiate Women's Wrestling Championships.
University of the Cumberlands enters Saturday's tournament will all three attributes working for them. The defending national champion will have the biggest squad of the eight-team field, bringing 13 athletes each. Eight of the Patriots' grapplers are ranked in the last North American College Poll, as ranked by TheMat.com, and return three national champions in Jessica Medina at 51 kg., Othella Lucas at 59 kg., and Alaina Berube at 63 kg.
In addition, the talent on the Cumberlands squad was evident when the team won a dual over Northern Michigan University's Olympic Education Center program on Feb. 23. The Patriots won five of seven matches from the hopefuls training under the auspices of USA Wrestling.
While Cumberlands will be the odds-on favorite to take another title, it can be assured that the other three varsity teams in the field will give the Patriots a run for the money. Missouri Valley enters the tournament with a No. 4 North American team ranking. The Vikings, who finished second at last year's tournament, return two national champions in Tabitha Ramsey at 48 kg., and Stephany Lee at 72 kg. In all, Missouri Valley brings five All-Americans back to the field.
Host Pacific will try to avenge a disappointing tournament last year as their lineup was ravaged by a number of injuries just before the tournament. Titilope Lawani is the team's top returning placer, finishing third in 2006 at 63 kilograms. Kapua Torres, who missed last year's tournament with injuries, returns to the four-athlete field at 51 kg. Torres enters ranked No. 4 in North America in her weight class, while the Boxers boast a No. 10 North American team ranking.
Menlo will look to move up after finishing fifth last year. The Oaks suffered from missing a number of their top grapplers last season and did not bring home any All-Americans. Carla O'Connell and Ashlee Evans-Smith are the top returning placers for Menlo, each finishing sixth at 51 kg., and 67 kg., respectively. Sara Fulp-Allen will be the favorite in the tournament at 48 kg. She enters the tournament with a No. 1 North American ranking.
In addition, individual wrestlers will represent Arizona State, Cabrillo Junior College, Cal State Bakersfield and Fresno State. A total of 44 athletes are currently entered in the tournament.
The national tournament, hosted this year by Pacific University, will be held on Saturday at the Pacific Athletic Center in Forest Grove. Sessions begin at 9:00 a.m., with the championship session beginning at 7:00 p.m.
For more information on the National Collegiate Women's Wrestling Championships, including the tournament schedule and brackets, visit National Collegiate Women's Wrestling Championships Web Site.
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