No holds barred
When this young wrestling champion heads into battle ,her gender is the last thing on her mind.

By KENDAL KELLY
World Staff Writer 8/11/04

With 15 minutes to go until weigh-in at the boys' northeast
wrestling regionals, ll-year-old Ashlynn Babb was still 16 ounces overweight.

If she wanted to compete, she knew she would to have to lose the weight
somehow, and fast. So she did the only thing left to do. Ashlynn let her step
mother cut off about 5 inches of her shoulder-length blond hair.

'They about peeled her," Ashlynn's grandfather Larry Abboud said. "She
looked like she was ready to go to the Navy."

Ashlynn was horrified."It was all crooked because my mom
didn't know how to cut it," she said. "I cried."

Even after sacrificing her hair, Ashlynn was still an ounce too heavy, so
she had to cut off pieces of her singlet until she was at the required weight for
her bracket -73 pounds.

"She wanted to wrestle, and that's how intense she is about wrestling," said
David Patton, one of Ashlynn's coaches at Team Tulsa Wrestling.

This year, Ashlynn, the only girl in the Team Tulsa Wrestling group, fin-
ished third in boys' northeast regionals and won the girls' state championship.

Ashlynn went on to finish fourth at girls' nationals in Detroit, despite severe
whiplash she had suffered in a car accident six days earlier.

Until girls' state, Ashlynn had only wrestled boys.

She's "just a pretty typical kid, but jwhen it comes to wrestling, she's tena-
cious," Patton said. "She gets out there and just flat out takes it to them. It.
doesn't matter if she's wrestling a little girl or wrestling a boy."

Patton admits that some boys don't like to wrestle Ashlynn.
"Some of them get frustrated when they do wrestle her and she's thumping them," he said.

'The guys in her weight class know that she's a good competitor, and
she gets after them."

Ashlynn lives in Tulsa with her father, Paul, her stepmother Kim, and her
siblings, Austin, 13, Ali, 13, and Colin, 8.

She's come a long way from where she was two years ago, when she decided to take up wrestling after
.watching her brothers at practice.

"I thought, 'I can do this;I can wrestle,'" she said.

During her first season,she won only two matches: the first and the last one.
"And she lost a whole bunch in between!" Paul Babb said.

In order to focus on wrestling, Ashlynn also had to
overcome the death of her mother, who died shortly before Ashlynn began wres.tling.

"You don't really get over it," she said. "You just have
to let it out and not take it .like the world is at the end,
because it's not, and you still have to take care of yourself."

Even though Ashlynn's first year of wrestling was tough, Babb said his daugh-
ter is now the best wrestler in the family, even better than both of her brothers.

"If they were all the same weight, Ashlynn would clean their clocks," he said.

Ashlynn plans to continue wrestling with Team Tulsa until high school, when she hopes she will be able to
join her school's wrestling .team.

Although she is one of few girls to compete in a male-dominated sport, Ashlynn isn't unlike most girls,
she said. She likes to paint her nails -currently a shimmery pink -fix her hair, wear makeup and shop -especially for shoes.
"I'm a girly girl," Ashlynn said. "I'm like all the other girls. I just like more active