Going to the Mat on Pins and Needles : Braving the Barbs of Her Teammates at Buena, Strong-Willed Anita Stansbery Quickly Shows That She Belongs as ‘One of the Guys’

Jim Jackson heard the rumor at the end of last season. A girl would be going out this season for the Buena High wrestling team. A girl ! Jackson envisioned pink tights, perfume and ponytails wrecking the rough-and-tumble, sweat-scented sanctity of the wrestling room.

“Wrestling is such a man’s sport,” said Jackson, a 119-pound senior. “I thought she’d come in here and make us all look like a bunch of women.”

A month into the current season, Jackson is relieved that the presence of Anita Stansbery, a 125-pound senior, has diminished neither the sport nor the team: Wrestling at Buena remains hard-nosed and competitive.

“I’ve been proven wrong,” Jackson said.

He was right, however, about the ponytail. Stansbery wears a bushy brown ponytail during practice, but there’s nothing girlish about her technique. At a recent novice meet, she pinned a boy in 24 seconds. She has wrestled twice for the varsity this season, getting pinned by a boy and pinning another girl in 80 seconds.

“Anita knows her wrestling,” Buena Coach Martin Juarez said. “And she’s just as tough as any guy in the wrestling room.”

Stansbery is one of only a handful of area girls who wrestle on their high school teams. Nationwide, girls are but a fraction of the total number of prep wrestlers--132 of 230,673 last season. Not everybody is happy to see them compete against the opposite sex in a body-contact sport such as wrestling.

“Girls and boys don’t belong on the same mat,” said Fritz McGinness, who oversees wrestling for the National Federation of State High School Assns. “You can’t wrestle without having your hands all over your opponent.”

But Stansbery and her teammates think McGinness is overprotective.

“You’re just out to wrestle, which means not being grabby,” Jackson said.

And Juarez agreed. “I never had to tell the boys not to grab,” he said. “It’s just natural they don’t. When you wrestle, you don’t grab anyone’s personal spots.”

Stansbery was not suddenly bitten by the wrestling bug in her junior year. Her stepfather, Barry Armstrong, and three stepbrothers all wrestled, her brother Todd is on the Buena team, and Anita served as a mat maid (statistician) her sophomore and junior years and also took lessons in freestyle wrestling.

But she didn’t even know she was allowed to go out for her high school team until she saw Dana Ziegert of Newbury Park High wrestle late last season. She asked Juarez’s predecessor, George Wilson, to let her try out, but he refused.

“He was being chauvinistic,” Juarez said. “I made a deal with her. She could try out for the team, and if she didn’t make it, she’d be the team statistician.”

Despite Stansbery’s wrestling background, however, some of her teammates were skeptical and even hostile when she made her first appearance in the wrestling room.

“At first nobody wanted me to be in there,” Stansbery said. She could tell they thought she didn’t belong. “Guys love to be mean but I don’t put up with it,” she said. “Some guys are still mad at me because they don’t think it’s right” for girls to wrestle.

Stansbery might not have won the minds of the chauvinists, but her ability apparently captured their hearts. “They root for me when I wrestle,” she said. “When I pinned this guy (in a meet), everybody stood and cheered. It was awesome. They were yelling, ‘You’re queen of the mat!’ ”

Last fall, she also tried to be a beauty queen, competing for the title of Miss Ventura County. At 5-foot-5, with freckles and a turned-up nose, she paraded on stage in a bathing suit, high heels and makeup. She didn’t place, but her appearance reminded the boys that she was indeed feminine.

“Anita proves you don’t have to be a muscle-bound girl to wrestle,” Armstrong said.

A few weeks into the season, however, Stansbery again became, well, one of the boys. “We didn’t treat her any different,” Juarez said. “At first, there was a little bit of the girl thing, but now she’s just another wrestler. We even tease some of the guys for being sissies more than we tease her.”

Armstrong, a former coach at Oxnard College, was flabbergasted when his demure stepdaughter announced her decision to try out for boys’ wrestling. “I didn’t think she had a chance,” he said, “but I didn’t count on her determination.”

Stansbery does have an obvious weakness: Although stronger than the average girl, she is not as naturally strong as a boy her age. “It’s the one thing that really hinders a girl,” Juarez said. But that might not be a detriment against sensitive males.

“Usually, guys are beaten by a girl because they’re reluctant to manhandle girls,” the coach said, adding: “That’s why I can’t see girls physically beating the really tough guys. Some girls are tough enough to compete, but not against the guys out there who are determined to beat anything in their way.”

Stansbery will not mind avoiding those guys anyway. A top student with a 3.5 grade-point average, she went out for the team “for fun,” she said, “to see what it’s like,” not to prepare for a career in mud wrestling. A quick study--Jackson says she “really listens and goes after it”--Stansbery is proud to be earning respect.

“I heard from mat maids at other schools,” Stansbery said, “that their wrestlers were saying I was strong and they wouldn’t want me for their sister”--the ultimate compliment.

How does her brother feel about that? “She is pretty strong,” said Todd Stansbery, a 135-pound junior. He and his sister “don’t fight as much at home as we used to,” he said. “She can take care of herself.”