LAKE OSWEGO GIRLS GET A GRIP ON WRESTLING

AIMEE GREEN - The Oregonian 2/28/02

The two seniors say they got into the sport too late but hope
other girls will follow them to the mat

After Amber Carrier won her first wrestling match this winter, her
opponent started to cry.

Carrier, a Lake Oswego High School senior, caught a glimpse of him
tearing up in the hallway. Feeling kind of bad for him, she asked her best
friend and the only other girl on the team, Shannon Woolery, what she should
do. Should she tell him he put up a good fight?

"I said, 'Amber, noooo,' " Woolery recalled. " 'That's the worst thing
you can do. You're the last person he wants to see right now.' " The next
day, the boy's father called Lake Oswego High to complain about the girl
opponent.

Not everyone is supportive of girls wrestling with boys. But
nationwide, by the year, more girls are joining high school wrestling teams. According
to the National Federation of State High School Associations, there were a
record 3,000 girl high-school wrestlers in the country last year,
compared with 245,000 high-school boys.

Seniors Carrier and Woolery are two who helped girls forge their way
into the sport in the season that ended this month. They were the first girl
wrestlers in the high school's history, according to coach Dan Kumprey.

He doesn't count the two girls who joined the team five years ago but
dropped out after a week of practice. Carrier and Woolery have their
suspicions why the other girls quit: The first day of practice, in
November, was one of the toughest of their 17-year-old lives.

The coach had the team do plenty of fitness drills. And oh, did he have
them run. Carrier, who has never had a love of running, was the last one to
finish. Discouraged, she told Woolery she felt like crying.

"I was like, 'Amber, you can't cry. You can't cry!' " Woolery said. "
'We're girls, and we have to do well.' "

Then there was the wrestling itself.

"Wrestling hurts," Carrier said. "It feels like your arm is going to
rip out of the socket. You want to cry. You can't breathe."

The worst, for her, was when an opponent would brush by her eyes,
causing her contacts to spring out.

But the girls adored the sport, the mental challenge of deciding what
move to do next and the drive it takes not to give up.

Best friends since 14 Woolery met Carrier at a freshman orientation
dance at Central Catholic High School in Southeast Portland. Woolery mistook
Carrier for a cousin she'd met once.

"From there on, we called ourselves cousins," Woolery said. "It was our
inside joke."

The two discovered they were born four days apart and in the same city,
Portland. They both liked sports, such as dragon-boat racing. And they
both liked wrestling, a lot. So much so that they'd get in trouble for
wrestling in P.E. instead of playing basketball, volleyball or whatever they were
supposed to be doing.

"She's like my other half," Carrier said. "There is no Amber. And there
is
no Shannon. There's only Shannon and Amber."

When Woolery transferred from Central Catholic to Lake Oswego High in
January 2001, Carrier followed six months later.

And when Woolery asked Carrier to join the wrestling team with her last
fall -- Central Catholic didn't have a wrestling team -- Carrier thought it
was a great idea.

Woolery's mother, Laurie Woolery, was impressed by the girls' gumption.
But she was puzzled by their desire to participate in the sport.

"I don't know where it came from -- we're not a wrestling family," said
Laurie Woolery. Her daughter's only exposure to wrestling was years ago
on the living room floor with her older brother. The only other connection
she could make to the sport was Woolery's boyfriend, an Oregon State
University tudent who was a wrestler in high school.

Not everyone was accepting of the girls' presence. Last month one boy
forfeited a match against Carrier, stating religious reasons, coach
Kumprey said. Another forfeited, saying he simply didn't want to wrestle a
girl.

Kumprey was prepared for such incidents. Last fall he asked Lake Oswego
High's interim principal, Carol Matarazzo, about the appropriateness of
girls being on the wrestling team. Matarazzo gave Kumprey a load of
data citing federal Title IX, which says girls and boys must have equal
access to sports where federal funds are involved, such as at public high
schools.

So, Kumprey said, until there are enough girls interested to form their
own team, the girls will wrestle with the boys. And the boys will have to
get used to it.

A handful of wrestling teams in the area had girls this year, including
Tualatin and David Douglas high schools. West Linn, Wilsonville and
Lakeridge high schools didn't have any girl wrestlers.

Making adjustments Carrier and Woolery say there were teammates who
looked at them oddly. And there were others who were quite supportive. And
then there was one who argued that until boys could play on the school's
volleyball team, he didn't see why girls were allowed on the wrestling
team, the girls said.

But the mood n the team warmed as the season progressed, and the boys
saw that the girls were serious, Kumprey said.

"Everybody came to respect them," he said. "They were there for all the
right reasons."

Although the girls might have been respected, few boys volunteered to
wrestle Carrier and Woolery. They most often wrestled each other during
practices, even though they're of different weight classes.

Junior Daniel Steinberg, 16, wrestled Woolery sometimes during
practices. He said the girls' constant laughing and smiling brought positive energy.

"They're always cheerful," Steinberg said. "Sometimes it would be like
a regular day. But then you'd see them at practice, and practice was
better."

Wrestling a girl wasn't awkward, as some people might think, Steinberg
said. He was more worried about making the right maneuvers and winning.

And that's just what Carrier and Woolery like to hear.

"I don't want them to think of us as girls," Woolery said. "I don't
want them to think, 'Oh my God, what if I grab a boob?' . . . It's going to
happen. It's happened before."

But their experience on the team was different from that of the boys.

For one, the girls had to wait outside the weight room while the boys
were weighed, in case the boys needed to strip to make a weight class.
Sometimes, boys on opposing teams thought they were at the meet only to keep score
and alculate statistics. And one day, a bra showed up in the
lost-and-found
pile in the practice room. Both girls swear it wasn't theirs.

There were sweet things that happened, too. There were big, strong,
experienced wrestlers who could have pounded the girls down to the mat.
They could have hurt the girls badly. But they didn't. The girls appreciated
the sportsmanship.

Woolery and Carrier ended the season with a few wins. Carrier beat two
boys, and Woolery dfeated one girl. The winning was nice, but it wasn't what
the two friends enjoyed most.

Their biggest regret is that they got into wrestling so late. After
they graduate, Carrier plans to head off to masseuse school, while Woolery
plans to go to cosmetology school, so they won't get to repeat one of the
best experiences of their high school lives.

"I love wrestling," Woolery said. "I really love it."

"It's a blast," Carrier said. "Even though practices were really hard,
I'd leave each day feeling better about myself."

Added Woolery: "I really wish I were a freshman because if I were, I
would do four years of wrestling. I'd really encourage every freshman girl to
do it, too. . . . The guys will get used to it."