Takedown Report

Taina Fernandez Makes Maryland Wrestling History, Becomes First Female MIAA Champion

Ranked nationally among girls and boys, Fernandez’s dramatic 5-4 championship win powered Spalding to a team title and etched her name alongside Maryland wrestling legends.
Billy Buckheit | Feb 12, 2026
Taina Fernandez discusses strategy with coach Brian Leitzel at the MIAA Championships, where she made history as the tournament’s first female champion. / Trini Navia

Archbishop Spalding’s Taina Fernandez achieved another history making milestone by becoming the first female to win a MIAA Wrestling Tournament Title.
A Historic Night in the Toughest Conference
Traditionally the toughest conference in Maryland. The MIAA is a premier collection of private schools that have a monopoly on the Legacy Wrestling State Rankings with six of the state’s top ranked teams doing their work out the MIAA “A” Conference. “Once I reached the finals, knowing that I would make history if I won, I just tried to block that thought from my mind,” revealed Fernandez. “Although it would sneak its way into my head every now and then, I just keep reminding myself that I’m going to go out there and wrestle to the very best of my ability, just like I do in every other match. “There was extra pressure from that (potential to be first girls champ), especially at first, as I thought about it the days leading up to the tournament. However, I think once the day of the tournament came, I just knew I was going to do my best, regardless of whether it resulted in a win or a loss. Most importantly, I just kept reminding myself of how grateful I was to be able to compete at all, and that I knew my team and coaches had my back through it all.”

Taina Fernandez shows off her Outstanding Wrestler Award and championship Gold Medal after becoming the first female champion at the MIAA Wrestling Tournament. / Trini Navia
More Than a Milestone — A Team Difference-Maker
Fernandez’s Spalding conglomerate is ranked number one in Maryland as is Taina amongst the 140-pound girls in the state and nationally as well for High School on SI. Fernandez is ranked third on the boys list at 138 pounds by Legacy Wrestling in Maryland. The junior’s title winning efforts last Saturday at the Gilman School aided her Cavaliers’ title defense over Mount Saint Joseph, 274.5-266.
Fernandez taking down a St. Joe foe in the finals helped the cause as without that win, the Cavaliers would have fallen to the Gaels, 270.5-270. It was trending towards the top-seeded Fernandez finally suffering a defeat to a boy that was not a teammate as the Cavalier trailed 4-2 with 25 seconds left on the clock. … more at … https://www.si.com/high-school/maryland/taina-fernandez-makes-maryland-wrestling-history-becomes-first-female-miaa-champion-01kh92zjs75w

February 15, 2026 Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized | news, sports, wrestling | Leave a comment

Women’s and Girls’ Wrestling Is Ready for Its Modern Era

rom 204 high school wrestlers in 1989 to record-breaking numbers today, the sport’s long-overlooked revolution is now impossible to ignore—just in time for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
If you were to ask 100 random Americans what the nation’s fastest-growing high school sport is, few would come up with the correct answer: girls’ wrestling.
The release of the documentary All American, which chronicles the challenges on and off the mat of three wrestlers, Naomi, Jo and Arham, arrives at a pivotal moment in the trailblazing journey of girls’ and women’s wrestling in the United States.
Today, a record 47 state high school associations will crown girls’ wrestling champions, with more states adding full-team competitions every year.
At the collegiate level, participation has surged. Earlier this year, the NCAA officially named women’s wrestling as its 91st championship sport. The number of college programs offering women’s wrestling has ballooned—as evidenced by the fact that the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics will soon hold its fourth national championship for women’s wrestling.
At the youth level, USA Wrestling’s iconic Fargo tournament drew more than 2,200 girls this year—a number that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Team USA’s women are now global powerhouses, routinely medaling in world and Olympic competitions.
To the observer or new fan, girls’ and women’s wrestling seem like a sudden marvel, but the road to our current apex is filled with a long history of resistance, sacrifice and struggle. For years, even after the passage of Title IX in 1972, wrestling remained male-dominated, with opportunities for girls on the mat scarce and resistance to our inclusion supercharged.
For so many girls and women on the mat today, our story dates back to 1989, when five American women—Afsoon Roshanzamir, Asia DeWeese, Marie Ziegler, Janet Trussell and Leia Kawaii—traveled to Switzerland for the Women’s World Freestyle Championships, the first ever Women’s World Championship in which a U.S. team entered. Despite winning three medals during that tournament, they had no financial or organizational support, no national recognition, or parades; yet they persisted, representing a country whose wrestling gatekeepers had little interest or belief in our participation. Despite the hostility, their courage to compete at that time sparked the enduring flame of women’s wrestling in the United States that still reverberates.
Back then, a tiny fraction of girls wrestled in high school. In 1989, the National Federation of State High School Associations—the main body that governs high school athletics—reported that only 204 girls were wrestling at 25 schools nationwide, with virtually all of them on boys’ teams. Yet word spread about the women who had competed in Switzerland and what their example meant.
The following year, in 1990, the first official U.S. Senior Women’s World Team Trials event was held in Vallejo, Calif., with the winners qualifying for the World Championships in Tokyo, Japan. The dominant theme of that weekend was not competition but gratitude and community after years of isolation. Girls who had long been alone in wrestling swapped their stories and techniques, molding a foundation for the sports that continued long after that tournament.  That sense of community has remained at the forefront … more at … https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/26/womens-girls-wrestling/

January 1, 2026 Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized | news, sports, wrestling | Leave a comment

Men’s College Notebook: Influx Of Talent Expected Second Semester, Six Duals To Watch This Weekend

With the first semester across college campuses coming to an end, there will be an influx of talent as we head into the second half of the NCAA wrestling season.
There is a wide variety of reasons many top wrestlers had to sit out of the competition scene up to this point, but some very recognizable names will soon be returning to the mat.
Here is a short list of some of the top wrestlers who could make their season debuts any time now. The season will have to play out to see if anybody from this list decides to take the entire year off to save a year of eligibility.
133 pounds 
Lehigh’s Ryan Crookham was ranked #1 in the rankings last year at this time after coming off a third-place NCAA finish in 2024. He suffered an injury after last year’s 5-0 start and has not wrestled since December 2024. Head coach Pat Santoro expects his return to come in January.
141 pounds 
Crookham’s teammate at Lehigh, Luke Stanich, is a bit ahead of him in returning. Stanich finished fifth as a freshman at 125 pounds at the 2024 NCAA Championships. He deferred eligibility last year to work up to 141 pounds, and over the summer, he won gold at the U20 World Championships despite suffering an injury in his first bout. That injury has kept him out of the lineup thus far.
Dylan Ragusin has not seen action since the 2024 Cliff Keen Invite. He was a 2024 All-American at 133 pounds for Michigan.
Cornell’s Vince Cornella has been off the college mats since the 2024 EIWA Championships (back when Cornell was still in that conference). He did not see action last year but worked his way back this past weekend to a title at the Patriot Open, including a 10-4 win over #15 Tom Crook of Virginia Tech … more at … https://www.themat.com/news/2025/december/11/men-s-college-notebook-influx-of-talent-expected-second-semester-six-duals-to-watch-this-weekend

December 17, 2025 Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized | news, sports, wrestling | Leave a comment

Girls’ wrestling now the fastest-growing sport in the Country, and it starts young

When Ben Fallon was growing up in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, all he ever wanted to do was play football. Fallon was in fourth grade, and in Western Pennsylvania, pretty much every boy wants to play football. However, his parents had some strong feelings about that sport. “My parents wouldn’t let me play football, and I was just looking for a sport that I could be really physical in and get some of that energy out that I think all fourth-grade boys have,” Fallon said.
Wrestling was a sport in which he competed during middle school, high school and college. It was a passion for the sport he never really lost because, as he says, it shaped his character and his adult life. “Wrestling for me was a place where there’s no one else to blame but yourself when you are out there,” Fallon said. “You get out what you put in, and you own 100% of your success and your failure. And I liked that.”
“What really made me commit so much time and effort and energy was just wanting to not only win but show myself that I could be one of the best,” he said. When he and his wife, Corrine, got married and started having children, Fallon always believed he might find himself coaching a son. Except the son never came. Fallon, 36, smiles broadly. “I thought when my third daughter was born that wrestling was totally off the table for me,” he said. “I was kind of resigned to the fact that we were going to be a soccer family my whole life.”
And he was fine with that. However, that all changed last winter when his wife ran into the local club wrestling coach at Franklin Regional. He casually mentioned they were having “weigh-ins” if their girls wanted to join up. “When Corrine told me, I didn’t even really give my kids an option,” he said. “I just said, ‘Hey, I have good news. We’re going to try wrestling this winter.’ So it wasn’t like something that I had been planning on doing with them because I didn’t even know we had a girls’ program.”
All three girls, 8, 5 and 3, came to the first weigh-in, wrestled and fell in love with it on their own, Fallon swears. Last weekend, they competed as part of the Franklin Regional Junior Wrestling Program in their first tournament.
The girls are not alone. While the sport of wrestling has long been a male-dominated field, it has experienced significant growth among girls in middle and high school over the past decade. College-level female wrestling has also seen a big boom, Fallon said. “In fact, girls’ wrestling is now recognized as the fastest-growing high school sport in the United States, outpacing both football and basketball,” he said. “Here in Pennsylvania, nearly 250 high schools offer competitive wrestling for girls.”
Colin Dunlap, a Pittsburgh-based talk-radio host who spent … more at … https://www.timesrepublican.com/opinion/columnists/2025/12/girls-wrestling-now-the-fastest-growing-sport-in-the-country-and-it-starts-young/

December 16, 2025 Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized | news, sports, wrestling | Leave a comment