Postscript : Girl Grappler Didn’t Make Lineup but Won Her Point

Kerry Hanley said right up front that her bid to become the first girl on a San Diego high school wrestling team was no publicity stunt.

That was in November, 1985, when the 4-foot-11, 93-pound sophomore asked the San Diego Unified School District to change its policy and allow girls on boys’ football and wrestling teams. “I like to wrestle,” she said then. “I like the sport.”

The school board’s three women outvoted its two men, and Hanley won the right to go to the mat with Mira Mesa High School’s boys.

But the real test came when the last TV cameras had withdrawn and the reporters had stopped calling. Was Hanley going to stick with it or was she simply trying to get her name in the newspaper?

“Last year, she stuck with it,” said wrestling coach Jon Talbott. “She finished the season with us. She never ended up wrestling a match for us, but she was out there trying to make the lineup.”

It wasn’t always easy. Mira Mesa Principal Jim Vlassis said plainly that she didn’t belong in the sport. Talbott seemed more resigned than enthusiastic about his new wrestler. Some of her teammates also expressed their feelings about her presence in their midst.

“Some of the guys on the team didn’t like it,” Hanley, now 16, remembered last week. “Most of them changed their minds, but some of them didn’t. They would just say things and that made me more determined.”

She said there were the usual “snide comments: ‘Why are you doing this? You don’t belong here.’ ”

But Hanley kept showing up, and acceptance came gradually from most of her peers.

“They were reluctant,” she said. “I can imagine what they were thinking when they got paired up with me: ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to wrestle a girl.’ But as soon as they understood I wasn’t going to give in to them, they just treated me like anyone else.”

Or mistreated her like anyone else.

“They treated her as just one of the guys,” Talbott said. “She put up with a ‘crossface,’ where you get hit across the face. And you’re going to get grabbed almost everywhere.

“I think that’s what probably kept her on an equal basis with some of the guys: she took whatever came along and that made the guys a little less apprehensive about throwing her down, or bumping into her or whatever else.”

Hanley’s pioneering never earned her big-league celebrity status because her request to join a boys’ contact sport team was not unprecedented. In other parts of the county and across the nation, girls had fought--and won--the right to wrestle and play football.

And on Dec. 30, she was completely overshadowed when America Morris, a 108-pound sophomore who had joined Clairemont High’s wrestling team after Hanley opened the door, pinned a boy in varsity competition.

That feat, perhaps the first ever by a girl in American high school athletics, brought international publicity to Morris and Clairemont High. It earned her a spot on the “Tonight” show, where she demonstrated her wrestling moves for Johnny Carson.

Hanley, who wasn’t even good enough to earn a spot on the junior varsity, read about Morris’ accomplishment and wrote her a letter. “I said, ‘I’d like to talk to you because you’re doing the same things I’m doing,’ ” she said.

The two became friends, and they sometimes double-dated.

Hanley said she doesn’t begrudge Morris, also 16 now, the attention. She hadn’t tried out for the wrestling team because she wanted to be a trailblazer, but looking back, she is proud that she did it.

“I never wanted any credit for being the first girl, but I got it and it was kind of nice,” she said. “But then again, it was kind of a pain.

“It was nice that people cared enough to say something about it. But I felt that I had no privacy and I always had to be on my guard with people. People would come up to me and say things to me, and I didn’t even know them.”

Other girls followed Hanley’s lead. According to Talbott, girls joined wrestling teams at University City High, Madison High, Torrey Pines High, Fallbrook High and Escondido High. A second girl joined Morris on the Clairemont High team.

So far, no girl has gone out for a city high school football squad, said Wayne DeBate, the district’s manager of secondary athletics. DeBate, one of the people who is still uncomfortable with girls’ participation in boys’ contact sports, doesn’t anticipate a huge increase in the number of females seeking spots as wrestlers or running backs.

Vlassis, the Mira Mesa High principal, hasn’t changed his mind either. Despite Hanley’s year on the mats, he maintains that it’s too easy for a girl to get hurt.

“She’s a neat little gal,” Vlassis said, “but she still doesn’t belong out there.”

Hanley went out for wrestling again this winter, but quit when a school play took up too much of her time. She promises to be back in the wrestling room again after Christmas vacation. Talbott said she will have a tough job catching up with competitors who have been training for nearly a month.

But Hanley believes she has nothing to prove to anyone.

“I don’t really think about it that way,” she said. “The thing I think about last year is the shape I was in. I was in the best shape I was ever in. And now I look at myself and I say, ‘I want to be in that kind of shape again.’ ”