By Ryan Mink
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Bethesda-Chevy Chase senior Kim Seibert fell in love with wrestling in her middle school gym class. She said she can't throw or catch a ball, so wrestling was a natural fit.
"I'm really just doing it for myself -- seeing how many wins I can get," Seibert said. "When I first signed up, it didn't really occur to me that being a female wrestler was different, that it was against the norm."
Seibert isn't on a crusade. She isn't out to prove that girls are equal to boys. She believes her reasons for wrestling are the same as those of her male teammates. The difference this year? Seibert is one of five girls on the team. Overall, female wrestlers are no longer an oddity at schools across the Washington area.
Arundel's Nicole Woody, Magruder's Helen Maroulis and Robinson's Firen Gassman have shown the competitive heights female wrestlers can reach, and the sport is being changed at its roots.
Most girls don't have winning records or championship aspirations, and most don't wrestle on varsity. But they're coming out in record numbers.
According to the National Federation of State High School Athletics, 297 girls in Maryland (178) and Virginia (119) participated in high school wrestling last season.
According to the statistics, there were no female wrestlers in the District. The number of female participants in the two states has more than doubled the past two seasons.
"It's not a big deal anymore," said Kent Bailo, director of the United States Girls' Wrestling Association. "At one time, there was the 'I want to force the issue and be me' phase. Now I don't think it's as much to be a pioneer, but it's something they just want to do."
The desire to wrestle often starts at home.
Broadneck freshman Ariel Treadway comes from a house of grapplers -- her brother, Colton, has been wrestling since he was 6, and her father wrestled in high school and was a recreational league coach.
Colton started lobbying for Ariel to join the family tradition. After Ariel watched Woody, she realized the concept was anything but absurd.
"From knowing nothing to pinning people is pretty cool," Treadway said. "I played soccer, too, but wrestling is a lot of contact. I just love the physicalness of it."
Mount Hebron senior Cindy Heiser came out for the team to stay in shape for lacrosse. Bethesda-Chevy Chase sophomore Brenda Lopez originally just wanted to find something to relieve her stress.
Her coach, Bob Bunting, told Lopez to watch a wrestling tournament featuring Maroulis before coming out for the team. From that day on, Lopez set a goal of dropping enough weight to get to Maroulis's class.
"I don't want to seem like a stalker," Lopez said, "but she is amazing."
Maroulis placed sixth in the 112-pound division at the state tournament last season as a freshman. Magruder Coach Max Sartoph said young girls ask Maroulis for autographs after her matches. Woody's mother, Mary, told her daughter at age 11 that she would have to start to be a role model. Last summer, Woody became the first American wrestler, male or female, to win a junior world championship.
Gassman became the first girl to qualify for the Virginia Group AAA meet.
While Maroulis and Woody have impressed the wrestling community, when it comes to the swarm of girls who have been inspired by them, coaches' reactions are more tempered.
Wheaton Coach Dave Moquim, whose 40-year tenure at the school makes him one of the area's deans of high school wrestling, has two girls on his junior varsity team. Both are seniors, and he said both work extremely hard but aren't helping him build a program.
"It's like having a kid in AP classes who is not qualified to be in there and doesn't do well on the tests," Moquim said. "They're challenging themselves, but they are taking away from our teaching abilities."
As with every other coach and wrestler, a girl who works hard every day in practice earns Moquim's respect. So what if they all work hard but still can't make varsity?
"Well, then, maybe they should form girls' teams and have girls' coaches," Moquim said.
That's an option that might not be too far away. Bailo, who oversees about 5,000 girls wrestling in tournaments in 35 states, said he feels that every state will have girls' high school wrestling teams in 10 years. Three states (Hawaii, Texas and Washington) have high school girls' wrestling teams and championships, and four colleges (the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, Pacific University in Oregon, Missouri Valley College in Missouri and Menlo College in California) fund women's wrestling. Women's wrestling also debuted at the 2004 Athens Olympics, a fact that several coaches and administrators said fueled interest in the sport.
But Jim Mehan, who has been on the Maryland state wrestling committee since the mid-1980s, said adding girls' wrestling teams is "way down on the list," mainly because there aren't enough girls participating yet and they aren't competitive enough to take boys' roster spots.
The issue for most girls who wrestle used to be fitting in on a daily basis, but that has become easier with time. Girls taking forfeits because a coach or boy was afraid of the embarrassment of losing to a girl was common even three years ago. Now it's almost unheard of. Lewd comments are rare, and headhunting to drive a girl off the mat isn't tolerated.
"For a long time, they were looked down upon. I don't see that anymore," said Robinson Coach Bryan Hazard. "Now they see they want to be part of a team. As long as the girl comes in and doesn't ask for any favors, if they don't expect anything and just train as hard as the other guys, that's when they get their respect."
Most girls report that their friends' jaws still drop when they hear that the girls are wrestling, but the wrestlers themselves are some of the more understanding ones. "I feel like I've gained 30 brothers," Treadway said.
That kinship is starting at younger ages, with many girls competing in youth leagues. The earlier they start to wrestle with boys, the more familiarity boys and girls have with each other in competition. And with girls gaining more experience, some are winning at the lower levels. And that, as Treadway found, is the best way to get respect.
"We don't even kid them anymore about losing to a girl," Sherwood Coach Scott Beattie said. "We tell them, 'You better go beat her, because she wants to beat you.' "
Beattie has a wrestling scrapbook that includes a newspaper article from Feb. 6, 1976. It was about a girl named Madeline Moose, who "marked the beginning of change in the Capital Area Junior Wrestling League."
That was the first female wrestler he could ever remember.
"Now it's commonplace, it's accepted," he said with a nostalgic grin. "It's kind of done."
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