Going to the Mat

He’s on his knees, ready to make his move, with his arms wrapped around her thighs.

But she hooks her left hand over his arm and slams her right arm across his face, rude and strong. They thud to the mat, locked chest to chest. Twisting into a headlock, she pins him.

The move is called the pancake, and Fillmore High School freshman Heather Steffey is testing her mettle against sophomore Michael Hulley at wrestling practice.

She knows she is causing a sensation and she loves it.

“Guys say girls shouldn’t wrestle. It’s a boy’s sport,” says a red-faced Heather as she readjusts her long blond ponytail.

“But a whole bunch of people in my French class are coming to our next match,” she adds. “They’re not coming to see two sweaty guys wrestle. They’re coming to see a girl.”

Across the county and the country, girls are taking to the wrestling mat--once the bastion of sinewy strong boys in skin-tight suits--as never before and making a name for themselves.

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

Now the United States has junior and senior national women’s teams and a two-time world champion, and the number of schoolgirl wrestlers has doubled in the last three years, according to the National Federation of State High School Assns. Women’s wrestling will even be part of the 2004 Olympic Games.

Similar changes are occurring locally.

Last year, Channel Islands High School’s Olivia Ocampo made state history when she beat every boy in California in her weight class to become state champion. And Oxnard High’s Motoko Kitazumi placed third in her weight class statewide. She vows she will win this year.

Federal Title IX legislation--mandating equal opportunity for boys and girls in sports--has been around for more than two decades. But wrestling is so rough, so high-contact, so intense that parents and coaches had long discouraged girls from participating, and girls themselves seldom considered it.

No one can say for sure why girls’ wrestling is taking off now.

But whatever the reason, girls from Thousand Oaks to Fillmore High School are stepping into the wrestling ring in their Lycra suits and ear guards, ready to compete in one of the world’s most ancient sports.

A New Experience for All Involved

The female invasion has left some local high school wrestling coaches a little off-balance.

But Fillmore High wrestling coach Bob Calderon is his girls’ biggest fan. He shows them off like a proud father. And when they wrestle in meets, he paces up and down the edge of the mat nervously, clenching and unclenching his fists, yelling out encouragement and pumping the air vigorously with his fist when they get the upper hand.

But not too long ago, it was a different story.

“I’ll tell you,” Calderon said. “In the beginning, maybe five years ago, when a girl came up to me to ask to go out for the wrestling team, I said, ‘You’re gonna be touched in places you have never been touched before.’ I kind of discouraged her.”

That girl didn’t go out. But at least one girl has come out for the team every year for the last four. Gradually, Calderon has grown used to the idea.

“The three girls I have now, they are so awesome,” Calderon said. “They hang in there with the boys and do everything the boys do.”

Calderon tries valiantly to treat his girls and boys the same, but he confesses that it is hard. He has to think about their clothing and what shows. And he worries a little more about injuries.

“Heather, put on your headgear. You are going to graduate with the ugliest ears if you don’t,” he yells across the room.

Near the end of practice, one of the girls gets kneed in the gut. As the team does sprints, she is crying. Calderon calls her off the mat and tells her to get a drink of water.

“If it was a guy, I would have told him to suck it up,” he said sheepishly. Still, overall, Calderon accepts the girls’ presence, although, like other coaches, he seems slightly puzzled by their desire to wrestle.

And indeed, every girl is different.

Freshman Valerie Brown grew up wrestling with her uncle, and her aunt arm-wrestles in Las Vegas.

“I’ve always loved the sport,” she said during a break at a recent practice. “My poppy done it. He said I’d be good at it.”

Senior Tanya Melgoza used to wrestle with co-captain Jaime Osegueda in the back of the restaurant where they both worked. He was so impressed with her abilities that he persuaded her to quit the basketball team and go out for wrestling this year.

Toughest Foe May Be Cultural Expectations

She said she likes the intensity and the contact of the sport.

And freshman Heather Steffey clearly loves the adrenaline rush of hand-to-hand, body-to-body contact.

“I liked that I could go out there and wrestle a guy and see how humiliated he’d be if I win,” she said with relish.

“I beat a guy two days ago and he cried,” the diminutive blond boasted.

All three girls giggled with delight.

Parents’ initial reactions to their daughters’ desire to wrestle ranged from incredulity to grudging respect. But the girls said their families are now enthusiasts.

Heather said her parents even suggested she shave her head and dye it royal blue, the Fillmore High color.

Tanya said her parents weren’t too excited, but once her mother saw it, “she was cool.” Her father, on the other hand, continues to think his daughter is engaged in WWF-type fights--in which beefy, oiled men pretend to pile-drive and body-slam each other for bloodthirsty fans.

The girls say the hardest thing is getting the guys comfortable with them in the ring.

“One guy was being really gentle,” said Valerie. “So I said to him, ‘Think of me as a guy.’ ”

But boys say that is not always so easy.

While it may be good for girls’ egos to take on guys in the ring--with the prospect of a win--guys say they have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

“Guys are scared to wrestle girls,” Osegueda said. “You look like a bully if you beat ‘em and you look like a wuss if you lose.”

Fifteen-year-old wrestler Sam Cruz agrees. “I wouldn’t want to,” he said. “It would feel different. You’d feel like nervous. I wouldn’t want to grab them where you weren’t supposed to.”

Worse, he said, is the humiliation and teasing that must be endured if a boy loses to a girl.

The girls’ presence has brought change outside the ring as well.

For example, wrestlers traditionally strip down to their underwear for the weigh-in before meets. If they were still overweight, they stripped completely.

“It’s still the same,” Osegueda said. “You just can’t get naked anymore” unless the girls leave the room.

Osegueda said it is also hard to watch girls wrestle, because “you don’t want them to get hurt or anything.”

Shannon Yancey helps coach at Thousand Oaks High School, where 10 girls are on the team.

Yancey, who herself began wrestling more than 10 years ago in high school, thrived in the mostly male environment and went on to become the four-time women’s national champion.

She said it takes a special girl to wrestle a guy.

And she is just as careful of the boys.

“In our society, boys will be ridiculed for losing to girls. High school is a touchy situation. Usually boys will be freaking out,” she said.

Just Members of the Team

It’s meet night at Oxnard High School, and the Fillmore team jogs out into the gym in formation. The varsity team is led by Heather, its tiniest wrestler. She won her varsity status the week before, beating the boy in her weight category for the coveted spot.

The bleachers are only half-full because it’s a preseason match. But the girl on the mat creates a stir.

Heather stuffs her long hair into a Lycra swim cap before donning her ear guards.

Before the match, the referee goes down the line of wrestlers, checking that their nails are short and their skin disease-free.

“She’s gonna have to shave,” he says to Calderon with a wink.

Heather wrestles first, against a junior from Oxnard High. He is a first-year wrestler, too.

Calderon wonders privately if Heather has what it takes to win this one. She has beaten three girls and one boy heading into the match.

“She’s riding high,” he says. “It’s time to throw her in there and get her to face reality.”

Heather jogs out onto the mat and shakes hands with her opponent.

He goes for her legs. She topples, and it looks likes it’s over.

But she wriggles out from under him like a slippery eel and throws herself on top.

The crowd cheers.

She is feeling good, fending him off. She stomps toward him aggressively.

They are down again; she is on top.

“Headlock, headlock,” Calderon yells from the sideline. He is on his toes, visibly nervous.

Then, just like that, Heather takes her foe down--and pins him.

Calderon shakes his head in relief and surprise.

As Heather runs panting and red-faced off the mat, Calderon hugs her like a happy father.

“Follow her example, boys,” he yells to the team.

Across the gym her vanquished opponent, Jordan Corpuz, sits alone at the end of his row of teammates, sweating, his ear guards unclasped and dangling.

But he takes his loss to a girl like a man.

He says his family knows the Ocampos--whose daughter, Olivia, won the state championship last year--so he grew up knowing girls could wrestle and win.

Besides, he says, he has wrestled girls in practice, so it’s nothing new.

“But the thing is the coaches,” he says. “When it’s a girl they say, ‘You better kick her ass.’ But they should realize, starting back a few hundred years ago, women were just basically property. But since then they have been rising . . . they are taking over politics . . . before long they will be on the top. It’s just a matter of when that will occur.”