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TheMat.com/ASICS Girls High School All-American Wrestling Team being researched; First-team members to be recognized at the first ASICS Junior Nationals for women
4/10/2002
Gary Abbott/USA Wrestling
The nation’s best girls high school wrestlers are again being honored with the announcement of the Second Annual TheMat.com/ASICS Girls High School All-American Wrestling Team.
This year, the First Team athletes will be honored and receive their awards during the ASICS Junior National Championships in Fargo, N.D., July 27. For the first time, USA Wrestling will hold a women’s division as part of the ASICS Junior Nationals. Traditionally, the ASICS High School All-American Team for boys is also announced and recognized at the ASICS Junior Nationals.
TheMat.com/Asics Tiger Girls High School All-American Wrestling Team is selected by a nationwide panel of wrestling experts. It is the only national all-star team for which female high school wrestlers competing on all four grade levels are eligible. Athletes from across the nation were considered for their achievements in high school wrestling, as well as the major post-season freestyle and folkstyle competitions.
In total, 72 wrestlers are selected to TheMat.com/ASICS Girls High School All-American Wrestling Team. This includes 14 First Team members, 14 Second Team members, 14 Third Team members and 30 Honorable mention members.
Each year, a TheMat.com/ASICS High School Wrestler of the Year will be selected and honored, recognizing the best individual wrestler in the nation. Last year, the TheMat.com/ASICS High School Wrestler of the Year was Toccara Montgomery of Ohio.
TheMat.com/ASICS Girls High School All-American Wrestling Team will be prominently featured on TheMat.com web page, as well as in USA Wrestler, the official publication of USA Wrestling.
TheMat.com is the official web page of the Amateur Wrestling Alliance, and is one of the leading sports web pages on the internet. ASICS is a national sponsor of USA Wrestling and a major supporter of wrestling at all levels.
All female wrestlers who would like to be considered for TheMat.com/ASICS Girls High School All-American Team should send in an application or athletic resume right away. In addition, athletes may apply for the team online at TheMat.com, click here for application.
As the National Federation of State High Schools has yet to determine specific weight classes for girls wrestling, the athletes were selected based solely on achievement and ability. An effort will be made to make a reasonable spread of weights on each team. Athletes will be identified in three weight ranges: Light (100-121 pounds); Middle (122-140 pounds); Upper (141 pounds and above)
Send information to Gary Abbott, USA Wrestling, 6155 Lehman Dr., Colorado Springs, CO 80918. With questions, contact Mr. Abbott at 719-598-8181, or via email at gabbott@usawrestling.org.
Six members of the 2001 First Team are still in high school and will be eligible again for this year’s team. They include Brooke Bogren of Santa Fe Trail High (Kan.), Erica Dye of Wirt County High School (W.Va.), Mary Kelly of Mahomet-Seymour High(Ill.), Keristen LaBelle of Lapeer West High (Mich), Alicia Mena of Humboldt High (Minn.) and Brandi Rosenbrock of East Detroit High (Mich.).
Women’s wrestling is one of the fastest growing sports among youth sports for women. There are an estimated 5,000 girls competing on the high school level in the United States today, and the number has grown each year for the last dozen years. A number of colleges have begun to add women’s wrestling on the varsity and club level across the nation. Women’s wrestling has been added to the program of the Olympic Games for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.
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4/6/2002 San Francisco Chronicle
WRESTLING: State champions Christie Ravera of Berkeley High School and Madeleine Briones of San Leandro High School came home with second-place medals from the U.S. Girls Wrestling Association High School Nationals on March 23-24 at Lake Orion High School in Michigan.
Ravera, who attends Berkeley, was pinned by a Michigan wrestler in the championship match to take the silver medal in the 134-pound class.
Briones of San Leandro High School was pinned by a wrestler from New York to win the silver in the 130-pound class.
Other regional wrestlers with Top-10 finishes at the tournament were Berkeley High School's Regina Alexander (sixth at 126 pounds), Castro Valley High School's Sharlee Solis (ninth at 105 pounds) and April Pabilona of Tennyson High School in Hayward (10th at 122 pounds).
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Going to the mat
Middletown; Apr 5, 2002
Will coed wrestling be a take down in Minnesota?
"YOU LOST YOUR MATCH to a girl?"
Some boys may be hearing those words more often as more and more high
school boys and girls square off at wrestling matches.
The National Federation of State High School Associations says that in
the past ten years, the number of girls on high school wrestling teams
nationwide has grown from about 100 to more than 3,000, mostly on boys
teams. Only three states, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas, have separate
girls high school wrestling teams. In states that allow coed (boy-girl)
wrestling, girls generally must join boys teams if they want to compete on the
mat.
Despite the growing popularity of girls wrestling across the country,
lawmakers in Minnesota are considering whether to roped part of a state
law that allows girls to take part in publicschool-sponsored sports with
boys if a girls team is not offered in a particular sport. If the repeal
succeeds, coed wrestling would no longer be allowed in Minnesota's public high
schools.
A Touchy Issue?
During a February hearing of a Minnesota House of Representatives
committee, some male wrestlers, parents, and coaches voiced their opposition to
coed wrestling. High school wrestler Abe Olson said that the full body
contact involved in wrestling makes him uncomfortable wrestling with girls.
"It's different than football. There you're separated by pads, not a thin
layer of pandex," Olson told the lawmakers.
Minnesota Rep. Paul Marquart, who coaches wrestling, said he does not
allow boys on his teams to wrestle girls. "If we saw these same things in the
hallways of [a] school, we'd break them up and send someone to
detention," Marquart commented.
Girls Will Be Girls
Some girl wrestlers and their supporters contend that coed wrestling is
often the only opportunity girls have to practice their sport. As is
the case in some other states, school administrators in Minnesota generally
say they haven't got the funds to offer all-girls wrestling leagues.
Minnesota Rep. Mary Jo McGuire said, "Obviously, the best thing would be for the
girls to have their own teams. But ... with the financial crises facing our
schools, it is going to be difficult to expand right now..'. In the
meantime, we don't want to take away the opportunity from the girls who
are able to, and want to, compete."
Melissa Kendall, a California high school wrestler who beat many boy
wrestlers on her way to earning a varsity letter, said, "Guys may be
bigger and stronger, but really it doesn't make a difference. When you go out
there, it's not a girl against a boy, it's wrestler against wrestler."
Should coed wrestling be allowed in public school sports programs? Why
or why not?
Make it count! Take part in an istant CE poll on this news debate. Go
to http://www.weeklyreader.com/ce
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Will wrestling bill pin local girl?
By Joel Stottrup 2/28/02
An 88-pound girl in the fifth grade at Princeton’s North Elementary is at the center of something some Minnesota legislators, including Rep. Sondra Erickson, R-Princeton, are wrestling with.
Legislators in the House are mentally wrestling with a bill Erickson has authored that would ban girls wrestling with boys as a sport in grades 7-12.
The bill was debated in the House education policy committee and was headed for the House floor, when the Union-Eagle spoke with Erickson by phone at the start of this week.
The Princeton fifth grader referred to earlier is Morgan Holland, who has been pinning enough boys to the mat in nearly three years that she has gained notoriety in wrestling circles.
She wrestles in a local club called Princeton Youth Wrestling in which Morgan is the only girl.
Her accomplishments for her weight class include:
• Champion for three years in a row in the state Jaycees Wrestling Tournament, competing against boys
• USA freestyle state champion last year (just girl wrestlers)
• National champion for two years in a row in the U.S. Girls Wrestling Association (USGWA)
• Champion last year in the five-state regional USGWA tournament.
Her father Jerry Holland predicts she will be national champion this year in the USGWA, noting that she has placed second two years in a row.
Last weekend when the local club competed at an open wrestling tournament in Sartell, Morgan won in her weight class and all of her opponents were boys.
“She’s looking good,” Jerry added. “She’s a seeded wrestler.”
The stance of Morgan and her parents, and what sounds to be at least the majority, if not all the girl wrestlers in the state judging from Erickson’s comments, is that they are against Erickson’s bill.
While the bill in the House caused a stir starting last week, Erickson actually drafted the bill last fall. She explained her reasons last week.
A few weeks after the state (high school) wrestling tournament last year some wrestlers and parents came to the Legislature to discuss the issue of male wrestlers not knowing how to respond to female wrestlers on their team, she said.
“The boys felt confused,” Erickson continued. She brought up the case of one boy who didn’t advance in competition because he didn’t wrestle one female wrestler and therefore forfeited his match.
Erickson said she didn’t think there would be any problem if the coed wrestling was between girls that have not reached adolescence and thus do not have the physical changes of an adolescent.
But the big issue, said Erickson, is that coed wrestling brings about conflicting messages – on one hand coed wrestling says “it is OK to slam a girl to the mat, to take them down or to force their body on them,” but it’s not OK outside the wrestling ring.
“They were raising, I thought, some good questions,” said Erickson, about the male wrestlers who came to the Legislature.
Erickson called the allowance of girls to wrestle against boys a “double standard” and says she has the support of at least some of the state’s varsity men’s wrestlers.
“I really think pitting girls against boys or boys against girls in a contact sport is an error in judgment,” she said.
She added that the kind of moves required for wrestling are “certainly objectionable for [boys and girls] in society, and becomes the basis of harassment suits and domestic abuse.”
Erickson explained her comment on the double standard by saying that society says it’s OK for girls to be in a boys sport but not vice versa. Some coaches have had to “make deals” with parents, she said, to set up parameters for what could be done in some coed wrestling meets.
Some history
Erickson, a retired English teacher at PHS, gave this short history of coed wrestling in Minnesota’s public schools: In 1972 the state allowed girls to compete in each boys sport except wrestling. Then 20 years later the state passed a law to drop the exception.
“Only in the last 10 years has it become an issue,” she said.
But now that the bill began taking on life in the Minnesota House, the estimated nearly 30 girl wrestlers in public schools across the state have been bucking Erickson’s bill, as have some adults.
One of the strongest opponents of Erickson’s proposed legislation is Morgan, who said she isn’t “scared” about the bill, “just mad.”
On the day after the bill had a strong audience of supporters in the House committee, Morgan made 40 phone calls to fight the bill, her father Jerry said last Thursday, during a Princeton Youth Wrestling practice.
Jerry and his wife Laura’s statements were their personal ones, he and other club members pointed out, because the club’s bylaws prohibit the club from taking political sides.
Laura said last week that wrestling was not a sport that she would have picked for her daughter, but since it is one that Morgan loves, she is supporting her efforts.
“Morgan picked it on her own,” she said Thursday. “It’s not like, ‘We’ve got a son in wrestling, let’s have a daughter that wrestles.’ ”
Laura noted that Morgan had 215 wrestling matches the last two years and there was only one time that a boy refused to wrestle her and that was the one where the boy’s father said no.
Jerry added that he has a problem with some people inserting that there is a sexual thing about coed wrestling.
“There’s nothing sexual about it whether it’s two boys wrestling or a boy and a girl,” he said. “In the wrestling moves we taught, you don’t even think about what part of the body you’re touching.”
Jerry also noted that Princeton Youth Wrestling head coach Phil Meinert is supportive of Morgan being in the club.
Meinert, while speaking to the Union-Eagle Monday, agreed with that assessment.
“She’s treated as if she were a boy,” he said about the treatment she gets in the club in which she is the only girl. “We don’t even notice that there’s a girl in here.”
Morgan has set her sights on the 2008 Olympics since female wrestling has just been added to the Olympics. For that reason, her father said, she needs to compete against high school boys in order to stay in shape and work toward that goal.
Debate may move elsewhere
Erickson noted that there may be an amendment coming to the bill that will put the question in the hands of the Minnesota State High School League and said she doesn’t foresee the bill becoming a law this session.
Erickson admitted she has received a lot of criticism for authoring the bill, noting that she must have heard from every girl wrestler in the state. But she also said she accepted the challenge.
“I want to be fair about this but if the boys have concerns . . . I want to hear the concerns,” she said. “I am willing to take the heat, the criticism, for offering the legislation.”
Estimating there could be as many as 6,000 boy wrestlers in the state versus 24 girl wrestlers, the Legislature “needs to hear what the young men have to say,” she said.
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high school wrestling, girls and boys on the same mat?
Recently the Minnesota state legislature has been discussing the problem of girls in high school wrestling. It seems there aren't enough girls to have their own teams and wrestle in girl-only competitions. Current law (Title IX) requires that girls who want to participate in a sport for which there is no girl-specific team be allowed to play on the boys team. Here is a timeline of girls in high school football. Like football, wrestling is a mostly male-dominated sport. So when girls want to wrestle they join the boys team.
Apparently this causes some concern (Response at themat.com). Some feel that boys and girls wrestling together is inappropriate (Proposed MN law to segregate wrestling). The law's primary sponsor in the House is Republican woman, Rep. Sondra Erickson, but apparently DFL men like, Rep. Paul Marquart, also find the current situation troubling (House Session Weekly). So it's truly a bipartisan effort to take away a girl's right to participate in the sport. Marquart invited two male wrestlers to demonstrate a move that apparently involves what would be inappropriate touching between a male and female wrestler. How this move is appropriate if both of the wrestlers are the same sex is not known. Apparently Marquart (a wrestling coach as well as a representative) does not let the boys on his team wrestle girls. Apparently some of the young male wrestlers feel that they have been not to touch girls in certain areas (uh huh, sure you have kid), so they have a hard time wrestling girls (lame excuse).
If the touching involved is so offensive when it happens between mixed genders, I don't understand how the entire sport of wrestling is anything but homosexuality on display (not that this bothers me, of course). And really, what kind of idiots are these high school boys? You get to writhe around on the mat with a girl in skin-tight clothes. Guys downtown pay big bucks to do this sort of thing, and these girls are lining up to do it for free. And you're saying no? This whole issue and this whole law is rooted in deep-seated gender-role nonsense. These girls know what they're signing up for, and if they get touched in a normally off-limits zone, they probably don't care. They're wrestlers.
I think the main reason boys don't want the girls on their teams is that it makes them feel less manly. On the mat with a girl they have to treat the girl as a true equal, instead of relegating her to the girls-only team. And it's no wonder Coach Marquart has a problem with having girls on the team, I bet it makes motivating the boys so much harder when you can't use traditional rhetoric like, "c'mon work harder, are you some sort of sissy?" during training. Most wrestling moves are inappropriate when done without consent off the mat. If they don't constitute sexual harrassment, they do constitute assault. So the whole argument that there are some moves that are patently offensive-- even on the mat-- because they involve mixed genders is a spurious complaint. Get over it boys. You can still check each other out in the showers without any distracting girls.
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From the Advocacy Desk at the Women's Sports Foundation- Girls Want to Wrestle Too!
Jessica Post
“My daughter wants to wrestle on the boys’ wrestling team, but the coach won’t let her.” “My daughter is on the boys’ wrestling team, but when they compete all the boys forfeit against her.” These are common complaints that parents voice to the Women’s Sports Foundation.
Why do organizations (and sometimes schools) choose the hard route? Why has the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA) sued the federal government seeking to weaken Title IX rather than deal with reality that girls deserve the same chance to play the sport of their choice as boys? Girls want to wrestle, yet enjoy limited opportunity. Wrestling coaches, through the NWCA, are primarily responsible for this resistance to expanding girls’ wrestling opportunities. The NWCA has decided to foot the bill for huge legal fees in an effort to take on the government to protect opportunities for boys to participate in wrestling rather than use that money to promote girls’ and women’s wrestling and supporting the expansion of wrestling programs for girls. The amazing thing is that boys’ wrestling does not need protection. At the high school level the number of male wrestlers increased from 229,176 participants in 1997-98 to 244,984 participants in 2000-01.
Currently, only 15 NCAA colleges feature women’s wrestling programs: a number that should continue to increase. For the 2000-2001 season, 3,032 girls participated on boys’ teams in high school. This number has increased from 1,907 girls in 1997-1998. And the growing popularity of women’s wrestling is not confined to America. It looks as though women’s wrestling will be a sport at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Unfortunately, and unwisely, the NWCA does not look at Title IX as a chance to share their passion for wrestling with female athletes. They only see the need to protect opportunities for male wrestlers. The NWCA’s focus on male-only wrestling threatens to alienate the very base of fans on which the future of the sport of wrestling depends. For every call that the Women’s Sports Foundation receives from parents stating that the wrestling team at their daughter’s high school will not let her wrestle, wrestling seems to take one huge step backward in its effort to secure the sport’s popularity and future national support.
Under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and under Title IX, when girls are underrepresented in the athletics program and a girl possesses the interest and ability to participate in a sport that is only provided for boys, a school is obliged to either provide a girls’ team, or to allow girls to participate on the boys’ team. It’s time to “get with the program!”