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FEMALE WRESTLER GRAPPLES WITH FOES ON, OFF MAT
Albuquerque Tribune
February 16,
1996, Friday
Ursula Chavez always has encouraged her children to take
part in athletics.
But when her youngest daughter, Amanda, asked her if she
could join the Rio Grande junior wrestling program, she didn't know exactly
how to respond.
"She's stubborn," Ursula Chavez said. "She wouldn't take
no for an answer. She kept asking me until I said yes."
That was five years ago.
Amanda is still wrestling -- on the mat and with
naysayers who think that the sport has no place for females.
Even her wrestling coach, Steve Ortiz, initially was
skeptical of letting a girl try out for the team.
"At that point, I was apprehensive," Ortiz said. "I
hadn't ever coached a girl before. But now I have no qualms about it.
"Amanda has raised herself to a top-notch level. She's
one of the toughest wrestlers on our team."
Amanda, a 14-year-old eighth-grader at Harrison Middle
School, also had to overcome the fears of her mother and taunts from boys,
especially from those she beat.
"It's been hard at times, but it's better now," Ursula
Chavez said. "At first, the boys would tease her. The parents weren't happy
about it
either. You could hear some of them jeering when she
stepped on the mat.
"It takes time for people to accept a young woman in
there. I understand that. And there's always going to be someone who will
never
accept it."
But that doesn't discourage Amanda from competing with
boys.
"Everyone teased me at first," she recalled. "But I just
ignored them. I don't care what other people think about me.
"Wrestling is fun and I just want to do my best."
Amanda wrestles in the 103-pound class. She will be
among about 580 junior wrestlers competing in the Southwest Open Junior
Wrestling Championships Saturday at Johnson Center on
the University of New Mexico campus.
"I haven't been doing too good lately, so I'm looking
forward to this tournament," she said.
But Amanda has come a long way from the girl who didn't
win a single match her first year in the sport.
She took first place at a junior tournament in Las
Vegas, N.M., last year in the boys and girls division 100-pound class and
was named the
most outstanding wrestler.
She also placed third at a national tournament in Las
Vegas, Nev., in a girls-only division. She wasn't allowed to join the boys
division.
But Amanda said this season has been tougher for her.
She is the only girl in Albuquerque involved in the
junior wrestling program and has had some difficulty keeping up with the
growth of the
boys in her weight class.
"It's hard because the boys are getting stronger and
taller," she said. " I'm not as strong sometimes so I have to make up for it
with my
technique."
And a dose of determination.
"My friends freak out on me because they're scared to
get in there and wrestle a boy," she said. "I don't look at who I'm
wrestling as either
a boy or girl. It's the same to me."
Amanda said she got interested in the sport from
watching her five brothers compete on the mat.
She already was involved in basketball, volleyball,
track and swimming, but was attracted to the individual aspect of wrestling.
"It looked like fun," Amanda said. "It's not like
basketball or volleyball. You can't pass the ball to someone. It's just you
against the other
person."
But in Amanda's case, she is also fighting for a chance
to be treated as an equal, regardless of her sex.
"She has a lot of willpower," her mother said. "This is
something I could never do. She's special to me.
"There have been many times I've asked her, 'This is it,
right?' I don't know how much further it will go. But as long as she wants
to, I'll
stand behind her."
Amanda said she is considering a tryout for the
wrestling team at Rio Grande High School next year, but realizes her
long-term future in the
sport may be limited.
"I'm thinking about it, but I don't know yet," she said.
"I'll decide when the time comes."
--------------------------------
Wrestling with change;
Berkeley High girl, 14, takes on the boys as a member of
the school team
The San Francisco Examiner
February 13, 1994,
When Hugh Johnson, Berkeley High's assistant
wrestling coach, wrestled for the Berkeley Yellow Jackets in the early
1980s, his twin
sister wanted to try out for the team as well. She
already played volleyball, ran track, and did gymnastics and crew. But the
coach
"wouldn't even let girls in the door," Johnson said.
Times have changed: This year freshman Samantha Reinis
became the first female to wrestle for Berkeley. At 14, she's the youngest
among
a half -dozen or so female wrestlers in the Bay Area and
shows enormous potential, according to her coaches.
Some thought she did it to flirt with the boys, but
Reinis said it was a desire to break new ground that took her to the mat.
"I wanted to be the first woman in something," Reinis
said. She just made it. Encouraged by her presence, junior Noemi Hollander,
16,
joined the team a week later.
A female wrestling opponent is a bit of a conundrum for
some of the boys.
"It goes against everything your mother taught you,
never beat up a girl," said Monte Vista wrestler Tony Onesta, 16, facing off
against the
Berkeley High School team Thursday night.
"When you wrestle a guy, you don't have any remorse
about grabbing or touching a part, but if you do with a girl you kind of
jump back
and start apologizing repeatedly," said Reinis'
teammate, second-year Berkeley wrestler Patrick McKenna, 17.
Reinis said a boy / girl wrestling match is no different
from two boys wrestling.
"People ask, "Aren't you afraid they will grope you?'
No. Look at the guys on the ground when they wrestle. They grope each
other," she
said.
Teammate Alex Balazs, 16, agrees with Reinis. "I don't
see any problem with (wrestling girls). They do basically the same things we
do.
They practice really hard, they go to the same matches.
And they win."
Reinis admits she's had a few bad moments, however.
During her first match, she wasn't wearing the traditional narrow-strapped
body suit
under her singlet. When her opponent stared at her
slightly exposed cleavage during the square off, she said she was completely
unnerved.
She now wears a full body suit and biker shorts under
her uniform.
Reinis sometimes pins her opponents in practice. But
although she has come close, she has yet to win any of her 10 competitive
matches.
Her small size is an advantage that most other female
wrestlers in the Bay Area don't have. At 4-foot-11 and approximately 107
pounds,
she doesn't have to face big, burly boys.
"When you start getting a little heavier, the guys get a
lot stronger," said wrestling coach Brad Itokazu.
The key to wrestling is technique, Johnson said,
something most wrestlers lack coming into the sport. Reinis is no different
from any other
freshman in that sense and she shows a lot of promise,
Johnson said.
"Sam has a lot of potential," Johnson said. "She is very
strong. She has a certain competitive flash in her and she responds well on
the mat,"
Johnson said. "If she works on her techniques, she could
be as good as any wrestler on the team."
Reinis' opponent at a recent exhibition match with Monte
Vista High School said Reinis was a lot better than two other girls he has
wrestled.
Still, "I always feel a little embarrassed when I
wrestle girls," said freshman Andy Fosse, 15, who feels girls don't belong
in a male league.
Their match lasted almost two minutes before he pinned
Reinis.
Breaking into the male-dominated sport was not easy,
even in the '90s, Reinis said. It's just in the past few years that girls
have become
part of a sport traditionally viewed as a macho arena.
During a match at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord,
Reinis approached a girl who she thought was a wrestler. It turned out she
was
a "wrestlerette" instead, a girl who keeps statistics
for the team. "Of course I'm not a wrestler," the girl told Reinis. "That's
gross."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Woman's odyssey a tale of despair to salvation
Wrestled in HS and Harvard.(Artie Bigley):
Copyright 1999 The Patriot Ledger
The Patriot
Ledger (Quincy, MA)
March 19, 1999
The story of Lauralee Summer's young life is an
odyssey of homelessness and despair to salvation and triumph
And it's a story of how several caring teachers can make
so much difference in one person's life.
Despite a life living mostly in shelters in California
and Massachusetts, Summer graduated from Quincy High School five years ago
and
graduated from Harvard University last year.
But she winces when she hears praise.
"People say my story is inspiring because I proved
anyone can do it," she gaid. "That it's the American dream that by hard work
you can
make it from nothing. But it's not true when there is no
place to live."
Summer said she is no different than any other child who
grew up homeless. She credits her succuss to the people, particularly
teachers,
who cared enough not to give up on her when she dropped
out of school in the fourth and seventh grades and once in high school.
She spent the first years of her life traipsing from
homeless shelters to welfare motels with her mother, Elizabeth Summer, in
California and
Massachusetts. When they were between apartments or
shelters, sometimes Lauralee Summer's aunt would let them a room at her
house
in Oregon.
Like many homeless children, she missed a lot of school.
Fatigue, hopelessness, no privacy and chaos were
constant companions while she spent her entire fourth- rade year in a
shelter.
"I couldn't focus. At that point, school was totally
irrelevant, because I couldn't even learn when there was all this crazy
stuff going on in my
life all the time," she said.
She said she bounced from one school to the next, often
missing weeks and months at time. Getting used to life in a shelter wasn't
easy.
"They'd turn on all the lights at 6 a.m. and tell you to
get out of bed because you had to leave in an hour. So it was hard to wake
up as a
little kid and see all those around me."
Living in a shelter destroys any sense of stability and
makes good parenting, nutrition or hygiene extremely difficult, according to
advocates
for the homeless.
Many homeless children are often foreed to share a room
with their parents whether they're living in a shelter or an overcrowded
apartment. Despite the difficult circumstances,
Elizabeth Summer nurtured a love of reading in her daughter, who soon found
an through
library books.
"That's how I got educated, basically," she said.
But life in a shelter offers homeless children little or
no privacy for homework and may expose youngsters to violence -- as victims
or
witnesses. And Summer's experience was no different.
"I know in the eighth grade there'd be knife fights in
the hallway (at an inn in Hull), and I'd just stay in the room," she said.
"If you live in a
poor neighborhood, you're going to see a lot of crime
and drugs, but at least if you have your own house your parents can keep you
inside.
If you're in a shelter, the boundaries between public
and private space are totally gone."
Studies have shown that fatigue can destroy
concentration, hopelessness can undermine initiative, and anger can cause
bad behavior for
many homeless children.
"I dropped out of school in ihe seventh grade," Summer
said. "I was bored in all my classes and I'd with my teachers. I don't know
what it
was, but I could deal with it.
When Summer was in the ninth-grade, she and her mother
started sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Quincy with another woman and
her daughter. For the first time, Summer said, she felt
stable. She excelled at Quincy High School, earning A's and participating in
every
extracurricular activity she could find.
She stumbled her sophomore year. She said was stressed
out, anxious and exhausted from her freshman year.
"I got three to five hours of sleep a night," she said.
Her grades dropped to C's and D's and she skipped school
for a month and half at the end of the spring semester. Then a teacher
stepped
in and coaxed her back to school.
"I would've dropped out of high school if it wasn't for
Mr. Mac (Charles McLaughlin, director of the city's Heritage Program)," she
said.
"He just listened and let me create my own answers for
myself. He was just there.
"I was so lucky to have the right relationships at the
right time. Yeah, I had a lot going for me, but I could've dropped out and
had a job or
not had a job at any point in my life if there weren't
these people bringing me back in, and that is so important."
-----------------------------------
When it's time to rock, these girls mean business
The Fresno Bee
May 2, 1999 Sunday
Once upon a time, someone mused that girls were made of sugar and spice and
everything nice.
Obviously, the person never swung by a California Kids State Wrestling
Championship tournament.
Sure, the 100-plus girls throwing each other into headlocks and half-Nelsons
may have perfect manners at home, but all that went six-feet under when
their matches came Saturday at Selland Arena.
"Man, some of these girls are tough," said Parlier coach Rick Flores, who
coached four girls in the competition. "Real tough."
Don't let the ponytails fool you -- there's nothing sweet about having
pressure applied to your throat while being on your back in the state
finals.
"They've come a long ways," said Tim Vanni, the two-time Olympian wrestler
coaching at Porterville. "They've definitely gotten a lot better since the
first national tournament in (1989)."
Look at Danielle Bebout, a sophomore at Yosemite High who finished fifth at
nationals in March. Her 36-second pin of Vanessa Olguin in the 132 1/4-pound
final was no different than what she's been doing for the last two years on
the school's varsity team.
She got her start five years ago because it wasn't any fun being on the
receiving end of a whipping.
"My brother Jeremy went out for the wrestling team, and he'd come home and
beat up on me and my sister," she said. "So I wanted to learn how to
wrestle, too."
Now she's delivering the mean stuff. Bebout's a two-time varsity letterman
on her way to the world tournament this summer. And from the looks of it
Saturday, Bebout won't be the exception for long.
"A lot of girls are like sponges," Vanni said. "They're real attentive to
every detail, a lot more than most high school boys. They're hungry for it,
and they really enjoy it."
"It's not growing as fast as we'd like it to, but we've seen it go from a
senior-level only down to this level with Novices (8-year-olds)."
Kids like Cecilia Ramos, an 8-year-old from Parlier. It was barely four
months ago that the third-grader asked her teacher, Mr. Flores, if she could
join the team, and now she's the 75-pound state champion.
