Girls’ wrestling: Becoming a league of their own

For the first time in school history, San Benito High will be hosting a standalone girls’ wrestling tournament.
Saturday’s Lady Bash, a girls’-only invitational tournament where girls compete as individuals, has a loaded field featuring several of the top-ranked wrestlers in the state from multiple weight classes.
Even though San Benito has only three female wrestlers on its team, coach Brian DeCarli had the ingenuity and resources to put on a girls’ tournament. As the popularity of girls’ wrestling expands, girls’ invitational tournaments are becoming more common.
“We’re anticipating 150 to 200 girls to be in competition, and 32 to 33 schools to be in attendance,” DeCarli said. “The really cool thing is we’ve got some returning state champions and a number of the state’s best who will be competing.”
Girls’ wrestling has come a long way. No longer a novelty, girls’ wrestling has been a state California Interscholastic Federation-sanctioned sport since 2011. States including California and Texas are at the forefront of the girls’ wrestling movement.
According to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), California ranks first in the nation with 472 schools participating in girls’ wrestling, with a total of 2,099 competitors.
The latter number ranks second in the country behind Texas’ 2,776 girls’ participants. Along with lacrosse, wrestling is one of the fastest growing sports for girls at the high school level, boasting increased numbers in every year since 2004, when women’s wrestling became an Olympic sport.
At least five states hold high school sanctioned championships: California, Texas, Washington, Hawaii and Massachusetts. Many other states hold annual girls’ state invitationals, which are simply non-sanctioned girls’ state championships.
“We hosted a girls’ tournament in conjunction with a boys’ junior varsity tournament the last four years, but this year we decided to do a standalone girls’ tournament,” DeCarli said. “Some schools have several girls’ wrestlers, enough to field a girls’ only squad. But most schools like us don’t have the numbers yet to field a full girls’ team. And that’s OK. I really think that knock on wood, if we do a good job leading up through Saturday, this could become a two-day tournament.”
San Benito has three girls’ wrestlers on this year’s team — Crystal Espinoza, Samantha Strickland and Sydney Lomanto — although Espinoza has yet to compete this season due to an injury. DeCarli said the opportunities for girls to wrestle in college are expanding as well.
There are at least 20 four-year schools that have a women’s wrestling program, and the number goes up every year. Samantha Barrientos, a 2013 San Benito graduate, is now wrestling at McKendree University, a NAIA program in Illinois. Barrientos went 2-2 in the Central Coast Section Championships last year, but didn’t make it to the state tournament.
“Samantha worked really hard, didn’t make it to state, and yet she’s wrestling in college,” DeCarli said. “It says a lot about the opportunities girls have to wrestle at the next level, and get some of your college paid for. Girls’ wrestling is definitely building, and it’s not going away.”
NOTES: Last week in the True Wrestler Invitational at Mission Oaks High School in Tulare — one of the top mid-season tournaments in the state — San Benito had five placers, including Simon Coelho, who was the runner-up in the 172-pound weight class.
Patrick Ippolito finished fourth at 140, Billy Rosenberg was sixth at 184, J.J. Melo was eighth at 222, and Matt Baldwin was eighth in the consolation bracket at 154.