Takedown Report

3rd Women’s Wrestling Notes, Results & News

Menlo is No. 1, Jamestown No. 2 in new NAIA Women’s Wrestling Coaches’ Poll
Action image courtesy of NAIA.org
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – In the second edition of the 2019 NAIA Women’s Wrestling Coaches’ Poll, Menlo (Calif.) took home the top spot for a second week in a row. The No. 1 Oaks earned a total of 206 points.
Top 20 Highlights
* The No. 1 Oaks had five wrestlers in No. 1 spots within their respective weight classes. Including: Alleida Martinez (109), Gracie Figueroa (116), Tiana Jackson (123), Marilyn Garcia (143) and Precious Bell (170).
* Wayland Baptist (Texas) had three No. 1 wrestlers this week including: Kaylynn Albrecht (155), Desiree Zavala (136) and Nina Pham (101).
* The top five remained the same from the previous poll (Dec. 6)
* All ten of the top-ranked individuals remained the same from the previous poll as well.
* This is the second year for women’s wrestling as an NAIA invitational sport. Twenty-eight NAIA institutions sponsor women’s wrestling teams during the 2019-2020 season. Women’s wrestling will be eligible for championship status once 40 institutions sponsor a varsity women’s wrestling program.
Poll Methodology
* The poll was voted upon by a panel of head coaches representing each of the four conferences and groupings.
* Two days prior to the national poll, each qualifying group rater submits the top six individuals from each weight class in his conference into the system. Only wrestlers listed on a conference ballot are considered for the national ballot. Rest of the story at https://www.teamusa.org/USA-Wrestling/Features/2019/December/12/NAIA-womens-rankings-12-Dec?mc_cid=128ff71298&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

Demetra Yancopoulos wants you to drop the modifier
“I just want to wrestle”: meet Demetra Yancopoulos
Five-foot-four, 120 pounds, every inch of her muscle-bound, she knows she’s making history. She knows she’s at the forefront of a movement. She knows it’s an important one. Yancopoulos is the second female wrestler in University history to earn a spot on Princeton’s varsity roster. She’s one of only two female wrestlers training for NCAA Division I programs today. She’ll likely be half of the first-ever Ivy League female wrestling match. But enough with that f-word trailing her every move. Yancopoulos just wants to wrestle.Before she was 19 years old and a Division I pioneer, Yancopoulos was 12 years old and a recess soccer star. Routinely and ruthlessly, she showed her playground rivals who was boss — and recognized an alarming trend. “Every time I’d beat a boy,” she said, “he’d tell me, ‘Yeah, you’re good. But you’d never be able to start on a guys’ soccer team.’” This did not sit well with her; Yancopoulos decided she had a point to prove. So seeking a sport that would allow her to compete head-on with boys (and following in the footsteps of her eldest brother), Yancopoulos tried out for her middle school’s all-boys wrestling team.  She passed a New York State fitness test, made the roster, spent a month learning the basics of wrestling, and suffered three humiliating defeats. Her dad and two elder brothers urged her to quit the sport. They told her (jokingly, she stresses) that she was bringing shame upon the family.  Rest of the story at http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2019/12/i-just-want-to-wrestle-demetra-yancopoulos?mc_cid=128ff71298&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

UHSAA Board of Trustees sanctions girls wrestling in Utah, details to be determined
High school girls wrestling is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States. Take Fremont High’s wrestling program as an example. Last year, the Silverwolves finished the season with five girls on the team and there’s 16 on the team this year with four more testing the waters and 12 more in the youth program. Brooke Handley, a junior who’s been wrestling for two years, is Fremont’s team captain, head coach Cody Storey said. “Each year for the last five years it’s really started growing. We’d get a girl here and there in our youth program … which was like a sibling that wanted to roll around with their brothers. It’s consistently growing even in our youth program,” Storey said. There’s a high school girls wrestling state championship in Utah County every February, plenty of girls wrestling clubs in the state, tournaments, clinics and lots of support for a sport that doubled in participation nationally from the 2010-11 school year to the 2016-17 year. And now in Utah, it’s officially sanctioned. The Utah High School Activities Association Board of Trustees voted at its Nov. 21 meeting to officially sanction girls wrestling starting in the 2020-21 school year. That would ostensibly target the first official girls wrestling state tournament sometime in February or March 2021, about a year-and-a-quarter from when the vote happened. “I think it’s really awesome, these girls are tough, they try hard and I think that it’s good that they get into it and enjoy it,” Handley said. Rest of the story at https://www.standard.net/sports/high-school/uhsaa-board-of-trustees-sanctions-girls-wrestling-in-utah-details/article_99bbfc3a-f8ed-522e-93fc-eb90136671e9.htm?mc_cid=0fa14e78f4&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

Fort Osage event highlights growth in girls wrestling
This was a scene Fort Osage freshman Haley Ward never imagined she would see. Here she was, surrounded by dozens of other girls wrestling Tuesday night on five mats in two gyms at her own school. “I really didn’t expect girls wrestling to grow this much,” Ward said. “I was the only girl when I started, so to see all these girls really makes me happy.” It was a happy sight for anyone interested in girls wrestling and another sign of how quickly the sport has been growing. Fort Osage played host to its first “Battle of the Braids” Girls Wrestling Scramble, and 185 girls from 28 schools – including William Chrisman, Grain Valley, Van Horn and Lee’s Summit North – showed up. No team scores were kept, and the competition took place in brackets based on ability. Still, it was an impressive display of participation and talent in a sport that just barely existed on the high school level until last year. “We’re kind of at the forefront of growth in wrestling,” said Fort Osage coach Brandon Wackerman, who oversees the Indians’ boys and girls teams. “Your seeing year two of wrestling being a stand-alone sport in Missouri and the first in Kansas. So this is just the very forefront of that and you’re seeing a great turnout in both states.” They turned out to compete in a round-robin format of three-girl divisions, with some weight classes divided into as many as seven divisions. Each wrestler got two matches. With so many girls so new to the sport, Wackerman believed the format was the best way to get many of them competitive matches against opponents of similar ability. “In a bracketed tournament, generally speaking all of the seeds are hitting unranked wrestlers,” Wackerman said. “People always ask in those tournaments when are the semis, when are the finals. The nice thing about a night like this is you had two Fargo All-Americans wrestling each other in the first 20 minutes.” Rest of the story at https://www.examiner.net/sports/20191211/fort-osage-event-highlights-growth-in-girls-wrestling?mc_cid=ccc735817e&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

Wrestling is an Iowa obsession. But where are the girls?
State association sees too little support for sanctioning the sport for girls’ teams
IOWA CITY — When she got to high school, Laurel Haverkamp didn’t try out for the wrestling team despite wrestling through junior high. The team was male-dominated and highly competitive, she said. So she stayed off the mat for her first three years at West High in Iowa City. This week, the 18-year-old was back on, spending hours Monday in the school’s wrestling room — running drills and jumping into a wrestler’s stance — with some 20 other girls who make up West’s first-ever girls’ wrestling team. The athletes are some of nearly 500 girls wrestling this season in Iowa, where the sport has exploded in popularity among high school girls only recently, despite a rich state history of wrestling for boys. About 480 girls are on team rosters this school year, according to Iowa USA Wrestling, up from just 40 girls across the state five years ago. But while teams crop up in several school districts — including Iowa City, Decorah, Dubuque and Waverly-Shell Rock — girls’ wrestling in Iowa remains an unsanctioned sport. Rest of the story at https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/education/girls-wrestling-teams-growing-in-iowa-schools-x2014-but-is-it-fast-enough-20191205?mc_cid=128ff71298&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

December 15, 2019 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized