Clairemont High’s 107-Pound Girl Puts a Big Pin on a Boy and There’s Quite a Reaction

A girl pinned a boy here recently, and we’re not talking about a sorority pin or a pin-up or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

We’re talking about a wrestling pin, the kind where somebody grabs somebody else, forces him onto his back and holds his shoulder blades to the mat for a split second. The referee says: “You’re out, fella.”

But, in this case, a fella didn’t win, and this is what’s so unusual. It happened at the high school level, and educators here say it was the first time in state history that a girl pinned a boy in a varsity match.

Might it be the first time nationally, too?

Bob Dellinger, the director of communications for USA Wrestling, said he has never heard of such a thing happening anywhere else. “Gee whiz,” he said, “I doubt there’s anything that’s been documented.”

So what we apparently have here is history.

The girl’s name is America Morris. You heard right. Her mom came from Mexico, and when she had her baby, she wanted its name to stand out.

“We lived in America, and America was beautiful and Americans had big hearts, and I thought it’d be beautiful to name her America,” America’s mother, Delia, said this week.

America said: “My grandma called me Amy because she thought kids would pick on me if they knew my real name. But I like it now. I see a map, and there’s my name. I see a billboard, and it’s there. I like it. It’s special.”

Anyway, nobody picks on her anymore.

She’s America, the beautiful. She’s blonde, she’s trim, she’s a model, she’s 15. She weighs 108 pounds, but Friday, when she wrestled against Mission Bay, she had to be down to 107.

She didn’t weigh in with everyone else in the boys’ locker room, though. She took a scale into another room, stripped and weighed herself. Once this season, a boy walked in on her when she was naked.

“Oops, excuse me,” he said, smiling.

See, this sport can be hazardous. What if a guy grabs her in the wrong place? That happened in the match she won. She was wrestling a boy named Russell Cain, and he accidentally touched her breasts.

“In the back of my mind, I’m thinking: ‘I don’t want to touch her in the wrong place.’ And then I did,” Cain said. “It was Blush City. After that, I didn’t do all of the moves I could have. I mean, I touched a part of her by mistake, and I was really embarrassed. I said: ‘Oh my. I should forfeit.’

“But I wasn’t thinking right. I didn’t know what to do. I was in dream time.”

So he got pinned.

The place went crazy, of course. It happened Dec. 30 in a meet at Madison High School. Cain was a sophomore from Madison, and America was a sophomore from Clairemont. Cain hadn’t expected to wrestle that day, but the regular 107-pounder from his school didn’t show up. The coach said: “You’re wrestling today.”

Cain said: “I am?”

He introduced himself to America. He said he’d be wrestling her. She said: “Oh really?” She smiled. He smiled.

“I made an instant friend,” Cain said later.

She took control in the first period. With only seconds remaining, she scored near-fall points with a reverse cradle. Matches on adjacent mats stopped as contestants ran over to see if girl could really beat boy. Spectators ran out of their seats to get a closer view, too. The period ended. The place erupted.

Then, 21 seconds into the second period, she ended it, pinning Cain with a half-nelson.

Immediately, she was surrounded by a crowd that lifted her up. Russell Cain, ignored by the crowd, fought through the people to find her.

He congratulated her.

She hugged him.

She later found Cain’s assistant coach and said: “You don’t recognize me with my makeup on, do you?”

He laughed.

Then she asked: “You guys won’t be too hard on Russell, will you? You won’t pick on him, will you?”

Too late. Russell Cain had a new nickname.

“Miss Cain.”

It’s a week later, Christmas vacation is over and we’re at Clairemont High.

America has been on every local television newscast, not to mention the front page of the San Diego newspaper.

She enters the wrestling room, where a teammate sees her.

“Hey, America,” he says. “Some girl I know says she saw you at a restaurant. She said she doesn’t like you at all, that girls shouldn’t be wrestling. That’s not feminine, she says. And she says you’re ugly. What do ya think of that!”

“Ugly, huh?”

She tackles her teammate.

Later, during conditioning drills, her boyfriend walks in. She blows him a kiss.

Now, we take you to the halls of Madison High. They’re talking to Russell Cain.

“Are you the guy that got slammed by the girl? Ah man, you’re weak?”

“Man, you’re a wimp.”

“Man, you’re a loser.”

“Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Gee, Russ, there’re some tough girls in this world, aren’t there.”

Russell Cain has had a talk with the school principal, who is worried about the youngster’s psyche. Cain has assured the principal that he is fine, and later says:

“It (the abuse) makes me want to get up and say: ‘At least I tried.’ Some guys wouldn’t even try.

“And if you think it’s all cookies and cake to wrestle a girl, you oughta try it. My friend told me before the match: ‘If you lose to this girl, I wouldn’t come back to practice for a whole week.’

“I said to him: ‘You’re a male chauvinist pig.’ I mean, I just see this as a minor setback.

“I used to weigh 95 pounds, but now I’m up to 103. I was really short before, really skinny. Now, I’m getting fatter and fatter. I want to at least be 5-10.

“I’ll keep on wrestling, too. And if I get strong enough, I’ll go out for football. That’s my favorite game. I’d be a receiver, or maybe a running back. Like I said, it’s just a minor setback.”

And at the home of Russell Cain, his mom says: “He came home the night of the pin and said, ‘You guys should have been there!’ He’s got a great attitude. I’m real proud of it.”

His dad says: “A guy from work brought in the newspaper and said, ‘Hey, was that your son who got pinned by a girl?’ I said yes. We all laughed about it.”

They all laughed at Kerry Hanley, too, for she’s the one who started this craziness. A sophomore at Mira Mesa High, she challenged the city’s policy that said females were not allowed to play contact sports (football and wrestling) with males.

She won.

She’s just a little girl, too, a 15-year-old who thinks she’s shrinking. “I think I’m 4-10, but I really might be shrinking. I’m dead serious. In my last few physicals, I’ve lost one-half inch and then another inch. I’m not going to worry about it, though. The more I worry, the more it’ll happen.”

So why wrestle?

She’s originally from Ohio, where wrestling is a revenue sport in high school. There, she’d been a cheerleader--”We called them wrestlettes,” she said--but, secretly, she wanted to participate. She and a close friend decided to try out, but Hanley moved to San Diego before she could.

So she did it here. She made her appeal to the school board, which voted, 3-1 with one abstention, to let girls play football and wrestle. The three members who voted to let her wrestle were women.

Anyway, when the news went public, America and one of her friends, Kary Clement, joined Clairemont’s team. A girl at University City High, Shannon Pippin, joined her team, too.

America has done the best so far. She was raised with three brothers, who constantly beat her up. She says they used to drag her down the stairs. She says they used to spin her around and around and drop her on her face.

“It’s amazing she has any brain cells left,” said her boyfriend, Derek Magdalik.

America said: “I was always under my brothers’ control. Now, it pays off. I can endure pain. I’m used to it. Pain doesn’t bother me except for one move. It’s called the guillotine. Basically, they tear your legs apart. That’s the one thing that hurts me.

“But my brothers were rough. Miguel, he used to tell me to clean the kitchen, and I’d say, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’ He’d give me a dirty look and sock me across the room. It’s not child abuse. Some people will read that and say: ‘Oh my God!’ Well, they’re my brothers.”

Pippin is the only other girl to have won a varsity match, but she doesn’t have such a clear-cut reason for being tough. She used to be a Girl Scout. She once won an award for starting a program that showed young kids what it was like to be handicapped. She’d tie a blindfold around their eyes, and say: ‘It isn’t so easy, is it?’ ”

She wrestled because it was a challenge, according to her mother, Sunny.

Shannon herself had little to say.

“I don’t want anything in the papers about me,” she said. “A guy pinned me, and nothing happened. If I beat a guy, why should I get publicity? What’s the difference? It’s not fair.”

The other day, she defeated a young boy on points. She asked that his name not make the papers.

“He’ll be ridiculed by his friends,” she said.

Shannon’s coach, Ed Yandall, said: “You know, these boys have nothing to gain. If they win, it’s expected. If they lose, they’re wimps.”

His advice to boy wrestlers? “Just win, baby.”

And don’t look now, but football season is just around the corner.

“I don’t think I’ll play football,” America said. “That is, unless I gain 100 pounds, drink beer and lift some weights. Who knows?”