Prometheus 6

While he is all for girls wrestling — his daughter, Stefenie, started wrestling at 8 and now, at 20, is an Olympic hopeful — Mr. Shaw said that for boys, coed wrestling can be disconcerting. “A boy who goes out on the mat against a girl doesn’t win,” he said. “If he beats her, he was supposed to, and if he doesn’t, he’s dead meat.”...

Occasionally, boys choose to forfeit rather than wrestle a girl, as happened at a Dobbs Ferry High School exhibition match this season, leaving Sophia Veiras, a sophomore, with no one to fight.

“It’s always a little intimidating for the boys at first,” said Jamie Block, the coach at the school, in Westchester. “They’re raised not to do this to a girl. And the thing about Sophia is, she’s very good. If you don’t really fight, she’ll pummel you. The girls who come out for wrestling now, they go to wrestling camps in the summer. They’re serious.”

More Girls Take Part in High School Wrestling
By TAMAR LEWIN

UNCASVILLE, Conn. — The takedown came after all of 12 seconds.

Jessica Bennett, Montville High School’s 103-pound wrestler, waited until Rich Wood went down to try to grab her leg, then launched herself onto his back, and got him down to his knees. After a brief stalemate later in the match, Jessica, 15, lifted him off the ground and took him back to the mat, for more points.

At that, several of Rich’s teammates, from St. Bernard High School here, looked down at their feet. There is still some pain in watching a teammate being beaten by a girl — even a girl like Jessica, who has won 23 of her 35 matches this season.

Wrestling may be the ultimate contact sport, and it can be a startling sight, teenage boys grabbing girls’ thighs, girls straddling boys, boys riding girls’ backs and trying to flip them onto their backs. For the most part, girls who want to wrestle — and they are slowly moving into the mainstream — must practice with, and compete against, boys.

Nationwide, about 5,000 high school girls wrestled last year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, nearly five times as many as a decade earlier. Those numbers are no doubt low, since many states failed to report girls’ wrestling participation, but whatever the full count, it is dwarfed by the quarter-million boys who wrestle.

Now that women’s wrestling is an Olympic sport, and, on some campuses, a college sport, girls’ wrestling is poised to take off. There is a Catch-22: Without many girls, there can’t be girls’ teams, and without girls’ teams, wrestling can’t attract all that many girls. The legal status of coed wrestling is not entirely clear, but in a few scattered cases, courts have ruled that if there is no girls’ team for them, they should be able to join boys’ teams.