Homecoming Queen, 17, Is Just One of the Guys : Newbury Park: Senior Dana Ziegert, the only girl on the wrestling team, wears a crown of respect from her peers.

Dana Ziegert stuck with it as the only girl on the Newbury Park High School boys’ wrestling team long enough to be accepted as just one of the guys, making the honor she won last year all the more striking.

“My principal said I’m the first wrestler to be voted homecoming queen,” the 17-year-old senior said. “I was really surprised to even be nominated.”

Dana learned at halftime of the Oct. 30 homecoming football game that she had beaten the four other girls nominated by classmates.

“All the other girls were way cool about it,” Dana said. “They weren’t, like, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have won.’ ”

Dana started wrestling in ninth grade and is now in the middle of her fourth year on the squad, she said. The plan was to try it for a week and drop out if it wasn’t fun. But she found she enjoyed the demands of the sport.

“When you’re done, you feel tired, hungry, thirsty, hot and sweaty, but it’s such a good feeling,” Dana said.

The fact that Dana kept coming back and working hard won her the respect of teammates and classmates who may have raised an eyebrow when she first went out for the squad, said wrestling Coach Marty Maciel, a biology teacher at the school.

“It’s the toughest sport on campus, by far,” Maciel said. “It’s the most challenging and time-consuming.”

Dana’s resolve has been tested: She hasn’t won many of her matches, but she never gave up, Maciel said.

“It’s not easy when you keep getting pinned time after time, or getting beat, but she kept at it,” Maciel said.

It hasn’t always been easy for Dana to pursue such a physical sport. Peer pressure took its toll in the beginning.

“For the first couple of years, a lot of people teased her about it a lot, but now people look up to her because of it,” said Eric Masaki, a senior who started on the team the same year Dana did.

Another senior who joined the team as a freshman said he laughed it off when he saw a girl trying out.

“I thought, ‘She won’t make it.’ And here she is, senior year,” said Casey Waldron, 17. “She’s homecoming queen and she’s still wrestling, and I think it’s pretty rad. She has a lot of character.”

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Dana said she wasn’t trying to prove anything by joining the team. She just wanted to participate in sports.

“I know people thought I was really a women’s libber,” she said. “I heard a lot about ‘Why is she doing this? Why would she want to?’ ”

The answer is simple, Dana said. At 5-foot-2, she’s too short for basketball, never excelled at softball or swimming, and didn’t like running. Her friends understood, and now Dana knows that other students have come around, too.

Like any homecoming queen, Dana said she was honored to win what is typically considered a beauty and popularity contest. But the victory meant more than the chance to wear a crown for the night.

“It made me feel really good that people know I’m still a girl and I like to wear dresses,” Dana said.

At a December meet in Camarillo, Dana marked another milestone: Wrestling at 130 pounds, she scored her first pin, beating a Ventura High School boy.

“It was the best feeling to know all this hard work paid off finally,” said Dana, who has wrestled both varsity and junior varsity this season.

Hardly gloating about the victory, Dana understood that her opponent must have felt uncomfortable wrestling a girl. Even her own teammates at first balked at the idea of grabbing, pulling and rolling around on the floor with her.

“I don’t think anybody really likes wrestling with a girl, which I can understand,” said Dana, one of only a handful of female wrestlers in the county. “But I’m used to it. We do it in practice every day, so it’s no big deal.”

Staying with wrestling taught her important lessons about life.

“Coach Maciel taught me a lot about always trying your hardest, and how you drill in practice is how you’re going to wrestle in a meet,” Dana said. “He said, ‘You can do it, you can win, you just have to work hard.’

“I feel a lot more confident because of this,” she added. “I think if I can go through this, I can do anything.”

Wrestling may have made Dana a stronger person, but it made her mother a wreck--but not because Dana is a girl.

“I would feel the same way if my son were wrestling,” Luci Ziegert said. “It seems so physical. It makes me nervous.”

She’s proud of Dana for hanging in there, however, and for gaining the respect of her peers over the years, her mother said. Still, when Dana’s name was announced as homecoming queen, Ziegert was surprised.

“She’s not really the glamorous type, so I was floored,” Ziegert said.

Her father, Scott Ziegert, said he was touched but incredulous when his daughter, the wrestler, was crowned.

“If we were to make a movie about it, everyone would walk out because it’s so corny,” her father said. “It’s too far-fetched. Even Disney’s smart enough not to do something like that.”