SHE MET HER MAT

The rules were strict in her house, especially for the girls, so she had to call her father to say she was staying after school.

“I want to watch practice,” she said.

“What kind of practice?”

“Wrestling.”

“What?” he asked.

He told her to come straight home. But she had found the wrestling room at her high school and was mesmerized. It was small and hot as a sauna. Rock music echoed off the walls. Bodies thudded against the mats.

It made the 14-year-old girl feel defiant.

“I’m already here,” she said. “You can’t make me come home.”

*

Olivia Ocampo wears wire-rimmed glasses and fingernail polish the color of root beer. Her hair is cut short. She is 17.

Uncommon strength shows in the curve of her shoulders, much more so in her legs. At 4 feet 9, she weighs a muscular 101 pounds.

“I’m a tomboy,” she says.

It doesn’t seem so long ago she was sneaking around, a disobedient daughter falling in love with a sport from the wrong side of the tracks. And she wasn’t content to simply watch practices at Channel Islands High in Oxnard. She wanted to wrestle.

But only about 1,600 high school girls compete in the sport nationwide. That’s not enough to form girls-only leagues in more than a few states.

So, like many other girls, Ocampo had only one way to go.

“Hey, she had to climb the mountain,” says Doug Reese, a nationally known women’s coach. “She had to put on that Lycra singlet, stand in front of full gyms and wrestle guys. That’s tough.”

Earlier this year, she became the first girl in state history to win a league title wrestling against boys. Then, competing in the first girls’ high school championships, she won a national title.

That helped Ocampo earn a spot on the U.S. team competing in the junior women’s World Championships this weekend in Fredrikstad, Norway.

Success stories like hers are fueling the growth of the sport, attracting girls to an opportunity that barely existed a decade ago. Ocampo appreciates that she is one of the pioneers, but, for her, the battle is more personal.

For her, it started at home.

Raised to Be a Tomboy

The Ocampo house is cluttered in a comfortable way that comes from having a family of two boys and four girls and lots of cousins and friends coming around. Flowered sheets are thrown over the couches in the living room, where an entire wall is devoted to graduation pictures.

The man of the house, Oscar Ocampo, is friendly and talkative, his face often broadening with a smile. But, retired from the Navy, he boasts of running a tight ship.

“None of my kids have been related to gangs, nobody smokes or drinks, nobody gets in trouble with the local police,” he says. “They don’t have time to get in trouble. I keep them busy.”

That means schoolwork and church. For the girls, it means a strict curfew--they must be home by dark.

“We are Filipino, so the culture is different,” Oscar Ocampo says. “The girl is supposed to be a little bit more naive.”

Yet, in a curious twist, he raised his youngest daughter to be a tomboy, giving her balls and trucks to play with instead of dolls. She makes a face when she hears this.

“He made me wear Scooby-Doo underwear,” she says. “And these little uniforms. Like military uniforms.”

He explains, “I think it was because I had only two boys.”

All the Ocampo children started taekwondo classes before they were 10. Oscar Ocampo learned some martial arts in the Navy and figured it would keep his children fit and teach them discipline.

It took awhile for Olivia to warm to the training. Eventually, however, she became an excellent student and earned a black belt. Fighting against other girls, she added considerably to the trophies her older brother and sisters had won before her, a glittering array that fills much of the family’s den.

Martial arts magazines dubbed her “the pint-sized powerhouse.” Oscar Ocampo framed the magazines and hung them on the wall.

But when his daughter fell for wrestling, she crossed the line.

Drawn by the Intensity

Curiosity drew Ocampo to her first wrestling meet. She was a sophomore and wanted to root for a couple of boys she knew on the junior varsity team.

What she saw amazed her.

“Oh man, the intensity,” she says. “Going out there and competing with someone, trying to gain control.”

The next school day, she went to the mat room to have another look. “I didn’t really like the music they were playing--terrible heavy metal stuff. But all the guys were wrestling.”

She struggles to explain what drew her to the sport. Maybe it appealed to her competitive nature, her yen for physical confrontation. And the stakes were higher than in taekwondo--she had to battle bigger, stronger opponents.

The coach tried to dissuade her. Another girl had gone out for the team the season before and had lasted only a few weeks.

Ocampo had her own doubts too. She worried about “guys getting really perverted . . . grabbing me across the chest.”

But her biggest concern was at home, where she had to persuade her father to sign the permission form.

“A girl wrestling boys?” Oscar Ocampo recalls. “I thought it was a little bit unladylike.”

Her mother was frightened. Esther Ocampo is a small woman, less gregarious then her husband, speaking quietly with the accent of her native Philippines.

“Olivia is very tiny if you look at her,” Esther Ocampo says. “And boys are naturally stronger.”

Her daughter would not back down. Oscar Ocampo discussed the matter with a school administrator and the coach. The girl had a legal right to participate. It took something more, though, some quick thinking on her part, to persuade her father.

“The reason I finally got him to say yes . . . I told him that wrestling was in the off-season for taekwondo,” she says. “I told him it would keep me in shape.”

Participation Doubles

Ten years ago, the United States had no women’s wrestling team to send to the World Championships.

Six years ago, only 219 girls competed in high school meets nationwide.

Now the U.S. has junior and senior national teams and a two-time world champion, Tricia Saunders. According to the National Federation of State High School Assns., the number of schoolgirl wrestlers has doubled in the last three years.

Reese, the coach, cites precedent: “If you go back into history . . . [the ancient Greeks] had the Heraea Games and women’s wrestling was a premier event.”

But a more modern development has opened the door for women in the sport.

Wrestling has staggered under the recent enforcement of Title IX, the federal legislation that, among other things, seeks to ensure equal opportunity for men and women in sport. At the college level, where male athletes outnumber female athletes, administrators have been scrambling to balance the numbers.

That has led to more women’s teams. It has also led to men’s programs being cut. Wrestling has been especially vulnerable because it draws less attention--and less revenue--than sports such as football and basketball.

So wrestlers have begun to admit women, sometimes begrudgingly, into their midst. Women’s wrestling will be in the 2004 Olympic Games. Reese, who had already established a women’s squad at the University of Minnesota Morris, couldn’t be happier.

“We can’t win the Title IX battle,” he says. “So we’ve got to join them.”

She Got Mean

Federal law meant nothing to the Channel Islands wrestlers. Ocampo could see only one way to win them over.

She would show up every day and push herself through every drill, the endless stand-ups and double-leg takedowns. She would take her lumps on the mat.

Her attitude impressed one of the seniors on the team.

“No crying,” Brian Peterson says. “You didn’t have to give her a break during practice. She’s just like any other wrestler. Like a guy, so to speak.”

Except that Peterson, who took Ocampo under his wing, found himself attracted to his new teammate.

“I was trying to teach her, but I was a senior in high school,” he says. “So I was also hitting on her.”

They began dating, which amounted to extended wrestling practice. He was not so much bigger than she at 5-6, 119 pounds. They would rent a movie and, halfway through, start wrestling on the carpet.

Peterson helped Ocampo through her sophomore and junior seasons, when she lost often. He grilled her on the basics--not only flashy throws and pins but also counters and takedowns.

There was another supporter along the way--her father. Oscar Ocampo had initially hoped she would quit. When she persisted, he began going to her meets, even though, he says, “When she wrestles boys . . . my blood pressure goes up. You know what I mean, right?”

Her senior season, the change occurred quickly. It wasn’t only her technique. She got mean.

“Really mean,” Peterson says. “She’s very nice when you talk to her, but when she wrestles, she gets really [intense]. You hear other wrestlers and coaches talking about it at tournaments.

“They see her and go, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s tough.’ ”

Ocampo couldn’t outmuscle the guys but she was quicker and could outmaneuver them. She was flexible enough to avoid pins and patient enough to win on points.

In December, she became the first female finalist in the El Toro Christmas tournament. In February, wrestling for the Marmonte League title, she scored a quick takedown against a boy from Camarillo, then held on for a 12-7 victory.

“Who would think about a girl wrestling boys and having a lot of success?” Oscar Ocampo asks excitedly. “That really opened my eyes.”

His daughter gets a thin smile on her face. Her competitive side emerges.

“You beat the guys,” she says, “that’s good.”

A Change in Attitude

The results haven’t convinced everyone.

“Guys,” Ocampo says. “They still look at me and think they can kick my butt.”

But the results have convinced her father and that is what truly matters.

Oscar Ocampo followed his daughter all through high school--three grueling years of wrestling boys. Then he followed her as she began competing in girls’ tournaments in the spring.

She won the 101-pound division at the inaugural U.S. High School Girls’ Wrestling Championships in Ann Arbor, Mich., then won four matches to take the 20-and-under title at the junior women’s national championships in Metairie, La.

Now Oscar Ocampo is in Norway with her. He says he is a changed man.

“I was so strict about girls,” he says. “Now I know they have strong minds and can do different things.”

And that may be his daughter’s greatest victory. It’s better than the medals and trophies. Better than the financial aid Reese will give her to wrestle at Minnesota Morris in the fall.

“I feel like I’ve actually accomplished something with my father,” she says. “With wrestling, he was against it and I could never convince him about something I wanted before.

“When I got him to believe in me, that was a real achievement.”