Fierce competition marked the state final for girls last week.

Grappling girls

Female wrestlers take on stereotypes as well as each other.

by Jane Slaughter
3/22/00

The action is intense, sweaty, fast.

The U.S. Girls Wrestling Association national championships will be held at Lake Orion High School March 25-26, $15 for both days. For more information call Kent Bailo at 248-627-8066.

Alaina Berube of Escanaba, short, trim and possessing some great biceps, launches her opponent across the mat. More than once. Like up in the air and down again. It’s not long before the girl is pinned.

I ask Alaina about the match: "She was tough, she was fast, she was kind of wormy."

"So how were you able to pin her?"

"Relentlessness."

Relentlessness pervades the Michigan state championship tournament of the U.S. Girls Wrestling Association (USGWA) March 19 in Lake Orion, this week to be the site of a national tournament. These are girls – 145 of them, from elementary to college age – who don’t give up. Not when their shoulders are a half-inch from the mat.

Not when male coaches tell them they can’t wrestle on the boy’s high school team. Not when they’re training four, five, six hours a day, for a sport that requires the highest level of conditioning: endurance, strength, flexibility, mental toughness.

"We like to wrestle," says Trish McNaughton Saunders, world champion in the 101-lb. weight class, who started her career at the age of 8 in Ann Arbor. "It’s too tough an activity to do for any other reason besides liking it."

Dana Skelton is an all-state soccer player at North Branch High, near Lapeer. She took a first in the USGWA’s Midwest Regional tournament in February, although it’s only her first year wrestling. Today she’s in the 150-lb. class. Dana says she went out for wrestling because of "the competition and how it’s a rough sport." She’s one of four girls on the North Branch team.

That’s unusual: Most high school teams in Michigan include zero girls or one. Girls wrestling, with their own teams, is a high school-sanctioned sport only in Hawaii and Texas among the 50 states. Only three small colleges have women’s wrestling teams. Girls who want to wrestle can do it at the club level, or they can make the "boys team." In Michigan, three girls represented their schools at the state high school championships this year.

Kent Bailo, founder, organizer and guru of the USGWA, has no objection to girls wrestling on boys teams. But to grow the sport needs high school and college teams established just for girls. A GM worker and UAW member, Bailo devotes his vacation and spare time (and then some) to promoting girls wrestling. As a ref, he saw girls wrestle boys on high school teams and, usually, get clobbered. "The girls who do well against boys are all little girls, 103 lbs.," Bailo says.

"Once they get older, the boys are just too much stronger."

Until Bailo started holding girls tournaments in 1997, he says, the few pioneers on high school teams didn’t know about all the other girls out there – and they didn’t have much chance to wrestle each other. Now he runs state tournaments in seven states and is expecting 500 girls – from as far away as Hawaii – for this weekend’s national meet.

Girls wrestling girls will get another big boost if, as expected, it becomes an Olympic sport in 2004.

Winning acceptance

Here’s something that gives hope for the next generation: The girls who wrestle on high school teams say their classmates don’t tease or shun them.

Girls like 14-year-old 99-pounder Lynde Baltrusaitis of Caledonia – who became a state champion last weekend – says she does encounter bad attitudes – but from other coaches, or other parents, or refs, not her peers. "They used to," says Baltrusaitis, "but now that they know I’m good they don’t want to hassle me, otherwise I’d beat the crap out of them. They respect that a girl is going out there and giving it her best shot in a guys-dominant sport."

Bailo fumes at the powers that be in high school and college sports. Particularly, he fumes at a lack of enforcement for Title IX, the law that was supposed to mandate equality between girls and boys sports. The NCAA and a congressional committee did a survey, Bailo says, that concluded girls weren’t interested in traditionally male sports like wrestling and football, and "therefore it was OK to leave it alone."

Bailo insists that interest follows opportunity, not the other way around. He cites Texas, where high school girls wrestling teams jumped from 35 to 85 in one year, after the sport was officially sanctioned.

Touchy subject

On the mats, the action is intense, sweaty, fast. The girls are pushing, grunting, curling, wrenching, contorting, expending every ounce of concentration and effort for three two-minute periods. You can’t relax for a moment because your opponent is always attacking, doing things that hurt you.

So the girls run – many of them do cross-country for their schools – and they lift weights and they do push-ups and sit-ups. There are some lean and mean fighting machines on these three mats.

I ask one of the East Detroit Wrestling Club coaches, Johnna Walker, about the benefits of wrestling. Her daughter Maureen, at 5 years old and 40 pounds, is the smallest girl in the tournament. Walker talks about confidence, self-esteem – but first she mentions stamina and endurance. Clearly, these girls are athletes first, young people in need of assertiveness training second. Or not at all.

What about the "inappropriate touching" question, when girls wrestle boys? (Odd how, in our homophobic society, this never comes up for boy-on-boy.) Monica LaBelle of Davison, mother of Keristen (who has a 50-10 record against boys), says she never thinks about it unless Keristen’s grandfather brings it up.

A towel boy named Shaine, who wrestles for Kalkaska Middle School, says wrestling girls "feels weird, it’s like, Oh I don’t want to touch this, I don’t want to go there. But at the same time, it’s wrestling."

Bailo explains, "In wrestling, any touching has one of four purposes: to secure a takedown, to secure a reversal, to get an escape, or to pin your opponent. You don’t go on the wrestling mat to cop a feel or to get a date for the prom."

Weighty questions

Since a big part of wrestling is leverage, wrestlers have always wanted to be the heaviest in their weight class. That has meant "cutting weight" to get to the next lowest class. For girls, this obsession with shedding pounds would seem to interact dangerously with the already existing pressure to be as skinny as a supermodel. But girl wrestlers say no. As Brandi Rosenbrock of East Detroit pointed out, "If you go down too low, there’s no point, because you lose all your strength."

And strength is where it’s at.

In June, tryouts for the U.S. women’s world team, and a younger cadet team, will take place in Battle Creek. Lynde will be there, so will Keristen, and Brandi (who’s a cheerleader, but likes wrestling more). These girls have their eyes on college scholarships and the Olympics and all the opportunities they believe will open up for them. "The cadet team travels around the world to Peru and Poland and stuff," says Lynde. And all she has to do to make it is to keep on being someone who can beat the crap out of you.

Freelancer Jane Slaughter recently took down the title of Best Metro Times Writer in our Best of Detroit readers poll.