News Page
SMWC news page 4/15/03
SMWC's Nicole Woody won USA Middle School Women's Freestyle Nationals. She teched and pinned everyone she wrestled. She also won FILA Cadet Nationals this past weekend and will be wrestling June 11-19, 2003 in The Cadet Ladies Internationals Gotzis, Austria. With the win she also gets free access to the Olympic Training Centers for one year.
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Local girl doesn’t let height get in her way
By Rachel Punch
Friday, April 11, 2003 - 15:00
Local News - COLLINGWOOD — Stephanie Peddle isn’t letting her stature keep her off the stage.
The 12-year-old has won five public speaking competitions and now has a chance to compete in the provincial championships in Mississauga.
“Every time I win it’s been different and amazing,” said the Grade 7 student at Cameron Street school.
Stephanie decided this year to speak about Turner Syndrome, which she was diagnosed with as an infant.
Turner Syndrome is a chromosomal condition only present in females. The syndrome occurs when one of the two X chromosomes normally found in females is missing or incomplete.
Women with Turner Syndrome are usually short in stature and can lack ovarian development. The syndrome effects about one in 2,500 females, and only about two per cent survive infancy.
“I wanted to do something funny and interesting (for my speech),” Stephanie said. “This is a topic that’s kind of new. It’s something funny because it’s about little people.”
Stephanie’s speech teaches audiences about the syndrome, but it also makes them laugh.
The line: “I can fit into small places and I’ll always be able to stretch out in the bath. Also, I look great in platform shoes,” usually gets a laugh, she said.
Stephanie said she has been on a growth hormone for about five years, so she has a chance of reaching five feet.
“I’m pretty much almost growing at a normal rate,” she said.
Stephanie may not be very big, but she was still a member of her school’s wrestling team this year.
“I wanted to try something new,” said Stephanie. “(Wrestling) is pretty fun. It’s not like the WWF.”
Stephanie said her wrestling training will help her next time she fights with one of her brothers.
“I guess I know if I’m on the rug and I’m mad at my brother, I can take him down,” she said with a laugh.
Talking about Turner Syndrome doesn’t bother Stephanie. Neither does being up on stage.
“Most of the time I don’t get nervous. I’m good on the stage,” she said.
Stephanie has also performed in church and school plays, and sang in choirs.
“The stage is one of her favourite places. She doesn’t get nervous,” said Lynn Ewing, Stephanie’s mother.
Ewing is very proud of her daughter.
“I started crying (at one of the competitions),” she said.
Ewing said it is so hard to tell who is going to win the next competition because all of the speeches are so well done.
“Everybody is a first-place winner. I can’t even guess who is going to win,” Ewing said. “It’s quite an intense level of competition.”
Stephanie and Ewing will travel to Mississauga for the next competition on May 3. The Royal Canadian Legion is holding a dinner for the participants the night before the competition.
“(The Legion) put a lot of money and effort out,” said Ewing.
Stephanie’s two older sisters will be meeting up with them at the hotel in Mississauga.
“We’re going to have a girls’ night at the hotel,” said Ewing.
Stephanie has also been asked to read her speech at a banquet during the Turner Syndrome Society Conference in Toronto on April 26.
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Harvey Twisters have girls champs, too
Sunday, April 13, 2003By Dennis Bowling
The Star
Harvey Twisters head wrestling coach Quintroy Harrell is quite famous because he has helped a plethora of wrestlers achieve greatness at area high schools.
They include four-time state champions Joe Williams, (Mount Carmel) and David Douglas (Thornridge).
Most recently, Harrell has added girls wrestling to the Twisters program. The recent United States Olympics is now featuring girls wrestling. Harrell is working with eight-year old Makeba Elliott and 10-year old Jasmine Plummer.
"Makeba is very aggressive," said Harrell. "She has a positive attitude win or lose. She is very strong and loves the sport.
"Jasmine is hesitant about being aggressive, but is very explosive on the mat. She is very strong."
Recently, Elliott and Plummer each won first place in the United States Girls Wrestling Association national tournament.
Plummer finished in second place and Elliott took third in the Junior Division boys state tournament.
Elliott's older brother Malik finished third at state for Mount Carmel in 1996.
"Yes, I felt that wrestling was something that I would like to do," said Makeba Elliott. "Finishing in first place made me feel like I was the greatest. I am very happy.
"Coach helped me with the different moves. And, I have had to work quite hard. I would love to wrestle in high school."
For Plummer, she finds wrestling a great deal of fun. She is also the starting quarterback for the Harvey Colts.
"My friends did not encourage me," she said. "It is really a lot of fun to do.
"I really enjoyed the competition at the tournaments. I am a great wrestler.
"Coach has helped me with my different moves and throws. And, he has helped me to be quick on the mat."
For Elliott and Plummer, they both have very promising futures in the sport of wrestling.
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By KRISTIN PROULX
Monitor staff 4/13/03
Jade Bunk of Franklin has borne these labels: tomboy, trouble-maker, outcast. But as a girl in a predominantly boy's sport, it's not notoriety she seeks. She just wants to win.
Jade Bunk is not thinking about being the only girl in a humid garage full of boys or about the 15 pounds of extra height and muscle her opponent surely carries in his gut and legs. Teeth clenched and elbows bent, she is not a 16-year-old girl at all. She is a player in this minute-long fight, this athletic war between strangers that always leaves her red-faced and out of breath but never truly beaten.
The junior at Franklin High School hates being called a female wrestler. She is a wrestler, period. And though most of her stocky male opponents outweigh her slim 98 pounds, she wins often with quickness and strategy. When she loses, she makes no excuses.
"There is no reason a girl can't be as good as a guy," she tells people. "We do have a different body composition, a disadvantage, but I don't care."
According to her parents, her coaches and her teammates, Jade works plenty. She ignores the people who tell her a teenage girl shouldn't wrestle with boys, and she ignores the pain of her head hitting the mat. None of it, except winning, matters.
For years, Jade has found ways to set herself apart from other girls her age, say her parents. As a child, she was a tomboy who preferred sports to dolls and
surrounded herself with a rough gang of little boys. At 11, she became a vegetarian, giving up the meat and milk the rest of her family lived on. In eighth grade, Jade discovered punk music, wore black clothes and dyed her hair bright pink. And now, she is the Franklin wrestling team's only female member, one of fewer than a dozen girl wrestlers in New Hampshire.
In a world full of teenagers struggling to belong, Larry and Carol Bunk say their daughter has never cared about fitting in. Sometimes, though, being different comes at a price.
The Bunks say their daughter's troubles began with a childhood tragedy. When Jade was 6 years old, she and her younger brother, Matthew, raced and wrestled around their family's Virginia house. One day, as the children ran, 3-year-old Matthew slipped on the bathroom floor. The boy's head cracked on the hard linoleum, and the Bunks rushed him to the hospital. Matthew's brain swelled inside his fragile skull, and a day later, he died.
Jade says she can't remember much about those days, but her mother says after Matthew's death, she watched her daughter transform.
"I believe Jade went into herself. She shut down emotionally. She felt like we abandoned her that year, and we probably did," said Carol Bunk. "To this day, she'll only let people get so close to her, and when she cries, she just hates it that she's showing that emotion."
So Jade became tough and invincible, determined to act the way she wanted to act, no matter the consequences. At the same time, she began to see the way people in a small, Southern town could face her uniqueness with judgments and accusations. If you ate different foods and listened to different music, you were an outsider, she said. If you were a girl who acted like a boy, you were bad news.
On her first day of eighth grade, Jade appeared at school with a new, spiky pink hairstyle. The middle school principal sent her home, telling her not to return until her hair was its former brown. When Carol Bunk heard her daughter had been suspended, she contacted Virginia's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that had recently helped a family win in a dispute with a school in a similar hair-dying case. With a single phone call and a few spots on the television news, Jade was allowed back at school.
But the community had already turned against her. The local newspaper ran editorials calling the girl disruptive and delinquent, a bad influence on the town's children. Jade's mother and father received threatening letters: They were asked how they could allow their daughter to act so strange, how they could be such irresponsible parents.
When Jade was 14, her role as an outcast became too much to bear. She and three friends, one old enough to drive, left their homes and set out. By the time they were picked up by the cops, they were a state away.
"We were all punk rockers and they ran my friend's license plates," she said. "We were only away a couple days. We were heading to New York. It doesn't make sense to my parents that you could live on the streets and survive, but I didn't see any future for myself at that school and I was trying to find one."
When Jade returned to her family, her parents began searching for places she could go to heal her angry mind.
"We knew we had to do something very stringent in order to save her," said Larry Bunk. "She was very angry and full of hate, in a really bad state."
Jade was sent to a wilderness program in West Virginia, where she spent four months learning outdoor survival skills. After that, she went to Idaho, where she stayed for a year with a couple who had experience dealing with teenagers in trouble. Last June, her family moved far from Virginia again, to central New Hampshire, where Larry Bunk once spent summers fishing.
In Franklin, Jade and her family found a community and school system where teenagers were not targeted because they looked and acted different. Jade found a skateboard park in town, and nearby mountains where she could snowboard. And this winter, she found the high school wrestling team.
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'One of the guys'
Jade first went to watch the wrestling team with a friend one day after school. The sport was intense and improvisational: its power intrigued her. Three weeks into the season, Jade joined the team.
Two years ago in Virginia, Jade had joined the boys wrestling team as a high school freshman. But during her first match, an opponent snapped her collarbone, ending her season just as it began. This time, Jade was determined to be a wrestler.
On the Franklin team, she learned the sport's muscle-crushing moves, postures with names like the Double Chicken Wing, the Guillotine, the Ball and Chain and the Lady-Maker. Unlike in Virginia, the boys on the Franklin team treated her as an equal, she said.
"They hit on me all the time, but I'm pretty much one of the guys," she said.
In her weight class this season, Jade proved herself. She won more matches than she lost and was named the team's Most Improved Wrestler. At the season's end, she was the first female wrestler to compete in the state Meet of Champions. Now she attends a wrestling camp in Plaistow, where she and a few dozen high school boys perform short drills in a garage lined with blue and red mats.
Larry Bunk, who was a high school wrestler himself, attends the camp practices several times a week, trying to relearn techniques he has long forgotten. On the sidelines, he coaches his daughter through 30-second drills.
"Get his leg," he says. "That's it. Pin him. Spin out under him."
Jade calls wrestling the purest of sports. There's no equipment, no team and few rules.
"It's you and another person, fighting to win," she said. "You're either better than them or you're not. You have to be smart and strong. You have to know your moves so well that it's instinct. There's no excuses, it's only you. It does hurt sometimes, but you don't feel the pain. You don't pay any attention to it. "
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Jade's world
Carol Bunk named her daughter after a dear friend, another unconventional woman who "marched to her own drummer." Bunk always hoped Jade would find a best friend like that, a girl who could share her secrets and be her partner in crime.
But Jade has always favored boys. In most teenage girls, she says, she sees weakness and insincerity. There's just something about girls her age she does not like.
This season, Jade wrestled only one girl, and she says she hated it.
"Most girl wrestlers, they go out there and they get pinned in 10 seconds," she said. They wrestle different. They're not rough and they're not strong. They don't get a lot of respect. If I ever got beat by a girl I couldn't deal with it."
Jade's grandmother, Mary Lou Gillum, visited the family last week from Virginia. After school one day, she watched Jade measure her hair to see if it was long enough to begin growing dreadlocks. Gillum shook her head.
"You're a beautiful young girl," she said. "You should be a girl."
Carol Bunk has given up trying to push girlish habits on her daughter.
"Jade came out, and from the moment she was born, she was her own person," she said. "Jade has always been interested in boy things. I wanted her to be her. She's been hell to raise, but she's going to be a hell of a woman."
Jade is not sure how wrestling fits into her future. She does know a few things. She knows she never wants to work a regular job. She'll be a massage therapist or a bartender, but she'll never wear a skirt and jacket or sit at a desk growing fat and pale, she says. Maybe she'll head to a city and live on the street or sleep in a car for a while. Maybe she'll return to the woods. She probably won't be rich, she says, but she'll never be common.