Wrestling women embrace chances

By David Uchiyama

Katrina Betts was a softball and basketball all-star in junior high and
high school.

But during her senior year she gave up those sports to concentrate her
time and efforts on her favorite sport: wrestling.

"Wrestling is what I can go furthest in. There are more opportunities
for me," Betts said, although women's wrestling is not a college sport.
"It's what I've been doing since I was 6."

She won the FILA 50 kg women's junior national championship Saturday at
Camp Jordan Arena.

Now that she's accomplished one goal, she is looking toward a much
loftier title -- Olympic champion.

The 2004 Games in Greece will be the first Olympics to have women's
wrestling as an official sport, and Mark Scott, USA Wrestling director
of state services, said it's about time.

"Now girls have a goal to shoot for besides international champion,"
Scott said. "There's something about being an Olympic champion that is
different than being world champion. It has a better mystique."

When Scott started wrestling in the 1970s, female wrestlers were
unheard of, but in 1987 women were invited to compete internationally for world
championships. In 1989 America sent its first team to compete.

Since then, participation by females in wrestling has increased
dramatically. But not without incident.

"There was a girl on my team in eighth grade who had her arm broken by
a guy in a match," Betts said. "He went harder on her because she was a
girl."

Betts, who has an athletic but petite figure, flowing blonde hair and
warm smile -- she is no mini Rulon Gardner -- has also been treated unfairly
at times.

"At one match a guy pulled my hair, grabbed me in the crotch, bit and
did other things that were unnecessary," Betts said. "He was eventually
thrown out of the tournament."

But for the most part, she said, she was treated equally on her way up
the ranks to the University of Minnesota at Morris.

"I was on a guys' team through high school and they treated me the same
as the other guys, because they would see me working as hard as they
were," Betts said. "You can't slack off and you better be there for the right
reason."

Betts' father got her interested in wrestling Heather Martin, by
contrast, took up the sport in eighth grade on a $7 bet with a boy.

"He bet me that I couldn't make it through two weeks of wrestling
practice," said Martin, who won the 70-kg cadet (ages 15-17) national championship
Saturday. "I liked it and stuck with it. It's a good thing I took that
bet."

Martin said her first year of wrestling was the toughest.

"I had a great high school that accepted me quite well compared to
other girls I've talked to," she said. "The guys didn't want me there at
first, but then I started winning and it was OK.

"I knew they didn't want me there, but that inspired me, too. The same
thing that pushed me away kept me going."

Martin said her close friends helped her during tough times and when
she wanted to quit.

"They have been my big support line. If I had problems, I'd talk to
them," Martin said. "I wouldn't be here if I didn't have the friends I do.

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Missouri Valley completes 2001-02 women’s college season as top-ranked team; Lock Haven boasts three individual No. 1 ranked wrestlers

5/20/2002
Gary Abbott/USA Wrestling

TheMat.com has released its final team and individual ranking for U.S. women’s college wrestling season with its May 2002 announcement. The U.S. college programs completed their seasons with three major USA Wrestling national events: the U.S. Women’s Nationals, the University Nationals and the FILA Junior Nationals.

Missouri Valley College, based on overall team depth, retained the No. 1 team spot. The Vikings placed second as a team at the U.S. Women’s National Championships, just one point behind the Sunkist Kids club. A total of 17 Vikings wrestlers are ranked in the final U.S. College Women’s individual rankings, although none claimed a No. 1 spot.

Ranked second in the rankings for the first time this season is Pacific Univ. in Oregon. Pacific had a strong team performance at the U.S. Nationals, placing third in the standings. Two of the Boxers wrestlers earned No. 1 final college rankings: freshman Tela O’Donnell at 121 pounds and sophomore Kaci Lyle at 158.5 pounds.

Placing No. 3 in the final team rankings was the Univ. of Minnesota-Morris, the nation’s first women’s college wrestling varsity team. UM-Morris had eight athletes in the individual rankings, including the No. 1 at 169.5 pounds, freshman Alicia Wilson. UM-Morris had good showings at all three USA Wrestling events: the U.S. Nationals, the University Nationals and the FILA Junior Nationals.

Lock Haven Univ. had the most individual No. 1 athletes in the final rankings with three: junior Jenny Wong at 112 pounds, freshman Erin Tomeo at 130 pounds and senior Sara McMann at 138.5 pounds. Wong and McMann won U.S. Nationals titles, and Tomeo placed second at the U.S. Nationals. These individual performances gave Lock Haven the No. 4 final team ranking.

Placing fifth in the final team rankings was Cumberland College, led by individual No. 1 ranked freshman Toccara Montgomery at 147.5 pounds. Montgomery won a gold medal and was named Outstanding Wrestler for the second straight year at the U.S. Nationals. Seven Cumberland athletes finished in the final individual rankings.

The No. 6 ranked team was Neosho County CC, led by five individually-ranked wrestlers. Rounding out the top 10 teams were No. 7 American International College, No. 8 Princeton, No. 9 Hawaii and No. 10 Menlo College.

The final No. 1 individual athlete was Stanford senior Patricia Miranda, who dropped to 105.5 pounds and claimed the gold medal at the U.S. Nationals. Miranda and Montgomery are the most accomplished college wrestlers on the international level, as both have won World silver medals.

The rankings are posted in the rankings section of TheMat.com, under the College Women section.

Athletes who are considered for ranking are eligible full-time college students, and are members of their college women’s varsity or club program, or a member of their college men’s wrestling team. The eligibility for the team rankings include both college varsity programs and college-affiliated club programs.

The 2001-2002 TheMat.com U.S. College Women’s rankings marked the first year that women’s college teams have been ranked. Women’s wrestling is the newest sport added to the Summer Olympic Games, and women’s wrestling is growing on the high school and college levels in the United States.

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Wrestling nationals open at Camp Jordan

By David Uchiyama

Arizona State University assistant wrestling coach Townsend Saunders
had a nice welcome to the city from a police officer Thursday afternoon.

Saunders sped down the road beside Camp Jordan Arena in a white rental
car. When he crossed Ringgold Road, the officer pulled him over at a gas
station and said he was speeding.

"But he let me go," Saunders said. "He said he was a wrestler. He was a
nice guy."

Saunders is in town for the men's FILA junior world and women's FILA
junior/cadet national wrestling championships starting today at Camp
Jordan Arena.

Mark Scott, USA wrestling director of state services, said this
tournament is the most important tournament of the year for many wrestlers.

"The wrestlers here are part of the bottom rung of Olympic
development," Scott said. "These kids are shooting for the 2008 or the 2012
Olympics."

Scott said he expects to have about 100 competitors in the Greco-Roman
style, 350 in the men's freestyle and 70 in the female divisions.

"The numbers will be down a little from last year, because there are
not world championships," he said.

Saunders, who earned a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics and a gold
medal in the 1994 Goodwill Games, brought three ASU wrestlers to Chattanooga,
including 20-year-old Mike Simpson.

Saunders retired from competitive wrestling after the Atlanta games and
settled down with his world-champion wrestling wife, Patricia, and
started working at Home Depot in Phoenix. He worked his way up the corporate
ladder to assistant store manager.

But he missed the sport.

"It's like a drug," Saunders said. "It's nice to walk into a high
school gym and have people recognize you."

So when former teammate Tom Ortiz was named head coach at ASU, Saunders
jumped at the opportunity to get back in the sport.

"I love sharing my knowledge, and experience with guys who are willing
to listen and soak it up," Saunders said. "I like showing guys new
techniques or improving a move."

But Saunders said coaching also comes with its share of
headache-producing moments.

"I have a taught time helping kids break bad habits, especially
(Simpson)," Saunders joked. "He had a hard time making weight this year because he
was never taught how to properly get it down."

Saunders also said he's had some difficulty getting wrestlers to
understand they are at Arizona State to get an education. That also means breaking
bad habits.

"Some guys are used to skating by and sitting in the back of the
classroom talking to girls," Saunders said. "That doesn't cut it at college."

Simpson said Saunders has greatly improved his technique, which has
directly resulted in more victories.

"He showed me how to hide my elbow-shuck and hit it from different
positions," Simpson said. "His technique is beyond belief."

Competition begins today with Greco-Roman preliminaries starting at 9
a.m. Freestyle competition begins Saturday and the finals will be held on
Sunday.

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Afghanistan Dreams of Olympic Return

Sun May 19, 1:51 PM ET
By TED ANTHONY, Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - He looks out from his office window onto the cracked, empty stadium below, and he points to the goal. "There," says the head of Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s Olympic committee, "is where they hanged people."

Now, in the new Afghanistan, where peace is a political mantra and most ills are blamed on the last guys who ran the place, the soccer field in Kabul Sports Stadium is used for something different. These days, they use it to play soccer.

In a land buffeted by 23 years of war, sport was hardly a priority. But this week, as Afghanistan sends its first delegation in three years to an international Olympic meeting, the athletes of an isolated country have a reason, however small, to hope.

"We are an independent country again, and we are ready to compete," the Olympic chief, Anwar Jekdalek, said Saturday. "All the world recognizes Afghanistan again."

It's not quite that easy. The International Olympic Committee (news - web sites) still hasn't reinstated Afghanistan, which it barred in 1999 in part because the harsh Islamic rule of the Taliban militia prevented women from competing.

But sending representatives to a meeting — this one in Malaysia, where the national Olympic committees of various nations are convening — is, officials here say, a good step.

Afghanistan faces formidable obstacles in most every arena, and sports is no exception. Athletes lack money, even adequate food; teams, clubs and the Olympic committee are all asking the interim government for financial help.

Communication between provinces is spotty, creating a tantalizing conundrum for any coach trying to cobble together a squad: Who knows what future stars are out there, kicking a makeshift soccer ball around in some field of deepest Helmand province?

Scorned but not banned under the Taliban (except for women's sports), today sports are everywhere. Taxi drivers favor soccer-ball stickers for rear windshields. On Saturday, a blazing afternoon, impromptu soccer and volleyball games abounded on fields and side streets.

"I have never played outside this country. Of course I want to," said Elyas Ahmad Monoshehr, a 29-year-old man from Kabul and a forward on the national soccer team. He wears Nike shoes and a shirt with a saying stitched on the breast pocket: "Keep cool when things hot up."

"Our athletes need to see how others are competing. They need competition that will make them better," he said.

Afghanistan last sent athletes to an Olympics in 1996, when three dozen traveled to Atlanta two years after the Taliban took power. By 1999, the IOC had banned the country from competition, and U.N. sanctions shortly thereafter sealed the deal.

But it was only the latest blow.

"Ever since the Communists fell, we've fallen behind in sports," said Hamid Popolzai, who runs Asia Sporting Goods in Kabul's Sharenow neighborhood. On its front door is a team picture of the Manchester United soccer team; inside, soccer balls go for 150,000 Afghanis (about $4.50).

"I understand why: When people don't feel secure, they don't play well," he said. "If we can participate in the Olympics again, it will help our athletes be more famous and get us back into things."

Jekdalek was president of the country's Olympic committee before the Taliban under President Burhanuddin Rabbani, in an era when factional fighting made living in Kabul a risky endeavor. A wrestler, he spent the Taliban years in London.

These days, he sits inside the Kabul Sports Stadium, which is decorated with ramshackle Olympic rings, and drums up international support. He traveled to Italy last week and returned, he says, with promises of support from its Olympic committee as well as Spain's and Ireland's.

Like many appointees of the new government, he recites the standard narrative of post-Taliban Afghanistan: inclusiveness.

"Anybody should be able to participate — any tribe, any ethnic group, men, women," he said.

Sports federations are coming together again, putting together teams — including women's volleyball, basketball and taekwondo, rusty after years of neglect. The country has rejoined 20 federations, Jekdalek says, and money is being solicited for regional tournaments to ferret out good athletes from the provinces.

He has made a promise to the IOC: If Afghanistan participates in Athens in 2004, a woman will carry the national flag into the stadium at the opening ceremony. At the head of the delegation, he predicts, will be wrestling and boxing — Afghanistan's strongest teams.

And one more sport, he predicts, smiling a sad smile: shooting.

"Our people know shooting," he said. "They've been shooting for 23 years."

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Police Investigate Strange Calls To Athletes

5/20/02

A Leawood, Kan., man is accused of making phone calls to high school athletes pretending to be a college recruiter, and then asking the athletes strange questions, KMBC's Martin Augustine reported.

At Higginsville High School, Augustine said that three wrestlers were called by someone last winter posing as a college coach making a recruiting pitch. Before long the wrestlers were being asked odd questions about discipline, and then were apparently asked to spank themselves.

The wrestlers told their coach about it, and he told them to call police.

"The kids were furious. I was furious. You just don't need that. You don't need it anytime," wrestling coach Dan Knapp said.

James O. Riccardi III, 42, is charged with five misdemeanor counts of child endangerment and harassment in this case. He is scheduled to make a court appearance next month.

KMBC reported that police are looking into dozens of similar calls made to other high school athletes throughout Missouri, Kansas and three other states.

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A Train Wreck Called Title IX
Some feminists actually seem to think ‘young girls aren’t worthy of respect and amdiration unless and until they act like young boys’

TITLE IX, AS ADUMBRATED by ideology-besotted Education Department regulation writers, has produced this lunacy:
Colleges have killed more than 400 men’s athletic teams in order to produce precise proportionality between men’s and women’s enrollments and men’s and women’s rates of participation in athletics. And Title IX has given rise to a huge “gender equity” industry of lawyers, sensitivity-trainers and consciousness-raisers.
The industry prefers the word “gender” to “sex” because “sex” suggests immutable differences, while “gender” suggests differences that are “socially constructed” and can be erased by sufficiently determined social engineers. The story of the policy train wreck that Title IX has become in the hands of such engineers, and of further misadventures that may be coming, is told in a timely book, “Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX” by Jessica Gavora, a senior policy adviser at the Justice Department.
The U.S. soccer players who won the 1999 Women’s World Cup were called “daughters of Title IX,” and when the WNBA began playing in 1997, arenas displayed THANKS TITLE IX! banners. This propaganda pleased people who believe all progress comes from government. But throughout the 1970s, the years of the most rapid growth of participation of girls in high-school sports, which presaged the growth of women’s college sports, Title IX was, Gavora says, unenforced and unenforceable because no athletics regulations had been written.
The first Title IX implementing regulations for athletics were written in 1979, and through most of the 1980s athletics were exempted from Title IX coverage. By which time, the women of the 1999 soccer triumph and of the WNBA were already excelling in their sports. By 1979, one in four high-school girls was participating. Since then, the Title IX “revolution” has made the number one in three. Clearly, autonomous cultural change, not Congress, produced the increase in female participation, which carried over into college athletics, where the real Title IX revolution has been perverse.
Gavora says the “ever-mutating” Title IX has been construed on the basis of a non sequitur: if there is unequal participation when there is discrimination, there must be discrimination when there is unequal participation. Title IX fanatics start from the dogma—they ignore all that pesky evidence about different male and female patterns of cognitive abilities, and brain structure and function—that men and women are identical in abilities and inclinations.

Confronted with evidence of what Gavora calls “the sportsmania gap”—men care more about playing sports—the fanatics say: This is the result of historical conditioning, which colleges must combat. Colleges must not just satisfy women’s demands for sports, they must create demands. Until it is created, statistical proportionality often can be achieved only by cutting men’s teams. Leo Kocher, University of Chicago wrestling coach, explains the Alice in Wonderland logic:
“Say there’s a school that has equal numbers of boys and girls and it decides to offer 200 athletic opportunities. If they have 100 girls who want to play sports and they have 1,000 boys who want to play sports, the law says you must give 100 opportunities to those 100 girls and you must give 100 opportunities to those 1,000 boys. In the end, 100 percent of the girls are fully accommodated but only 10 percent of the boys are taken care of.”
Between 1992 and 1997, 3.4 men’s positions on college teams were cut for every woman’s spot created. UCLA’s swimming and diving team, which has produced winners of 22 Olympic medals? Gone. University of Miami’s? Going. As are hundreds of men’s gymnastics, wrestling, baseball, track and other teams.
Under what Gavora calls Title IX’s “affirmative androgyny,” it is illegal to accept the fact that men and women have different interests, abilities and zeal regarding competition, or that young men have distinctive needs for hierarchy and organized team activities. As Gavora says, Title IX feminists seem to think “young girls aren’t worthy of respect and admiration unless and until they act like young boys.” And until women have their consciousnesses “raised” by social engineering, they need not be thought of as individuals, but merely as malleable raw material.
And now some Title IX imperialists want to extend it from locker rooms to classrooms: If participation in sports must mirror the sexual composition of the student body, why not participation in the engineering department? And why not in extracurricular activities other than sports—debating, orchestra, choir, cheerleading?
Title IX has become, Gavora says, the “codification of feminism,” and “the story of this law is in many ways the story of the women’s movement.” A depressing story.

NEWSWEEK

May 27 issue — On this 30th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX, the law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education, consider this: has even more nonsense been written about Title IX than has been committed in its name?

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