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Since becoming a UIL-sanctioned sport in 1998, wrestling continues to see a steady growth in Texas high schools.
By Heidi Pederson 11/15/2000
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
When Bill Middendorf started the Keller wrestling program last season, his first challenge was to correct the perception several athletes had of the sport.
"Most of them had no experience with wrestling. Their experience was WWF," he said. "Last year I had to have them buy into it."
Middendorf, who formerly coached wrestling in Kansas, is one of dozens of coaches who has introduced the sport to a Texas high school since its first University Interscholastic League-sanctioned season in 1998. That came 10 years after the sport was first organized in Texas high schools by the volunteer-run Texas Interscholastic Wrestling Association.
While the sport has not exploded since wrestling became a UIL sport, there has been steady growth, said UIL spokesman Mark Cousins. There are about 165 public-school boys teams in the state, he said, compared with the 134 public and private-school teams that competed in the TIWA state tournament in 1988.
There are also 104 public-school girls teams, up from the handful of programs that existed in 1998.
"The boys side has seen steady growth. The girls side has just exploded," Cousins said. "About 20 schools add wrestling each year, and I wouldn't expect that to decrease."
In some ways, Texas wrestling made big strides in 2000. In June, the 2000 Olympic Team Trials were in Dallas. At that meet, Amarillo native Brandon Slay became the first wrestler from Texas to make an Olympic wrestling team, and went on to become the U.S. freestyle squad's only 2000 gold medalist.
Texas high school coaches still face several challenges. Few coaches in the Northeast Tarrant County area have paid assistants, despite the often large number of athletes they work with, and many coaches said they still struggle to get their schools to pay for practice room and equipment.
Terry Knouse, who wrestled for Iowa State University and runs the powerhouse MacArthur program, said there are other roadblocks as well.
"I see too many places that are still hiring coaches with no wrestling experience. A lot of schools hire football coaches who know absolutely nothing about wrestling," he said. "If you've got someone who doesn't care, the kids won't care and it will fall apart."
Schools that have shown dedication to wrestling have gotten results. Grapevine, led by former University of Northern Iowa wrestler Steve Wills, has become a state powerhouse in less than seven varsity seasons. Last year the Mustangs had an NCAA Division I signee in Alejandro Alvarez. The school is building a new wrestling room.
Knouse said Keller has the potential for a successful future. The Indians went 10-5 in duals and had three wrestlers place in the top eight in the regional tournament. Middendorf was selected `Star-Telegram/Northeast' Coach of the Year.
Middendorf, who is also an assistant football coach, said he sees the sport fitting in at the school. Middendorf's top returner, 189-pounder Kasey Kromer, is also a starter on the football team.
"Really, I had no idea what to expect last year. They did better than I probably expected," Middendorf said. "This year we'll have probably 20 kids with experience, and that will be a big difference, I hope. The kids really seem excited."
Heidi Pederson, (817) 685-3872
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A sporting chance
Girls are learning that getting involved in athletics helps with the challenges of life
Times Union 11/16/2000
At a banquet table in Schenectady last week, Mariah Burton Nelson, author, athlete and speaker of the day, sat pole-straight, head and shoulders above anyone else. But when she walked up to the podium to speak to 225 parents, young girls and business representatives, her height and her message became truly apparent.
"How many of you are athletes?'' Nelson asked the crowd, and a few hands were raised. "How many of you walk, run or swim for fun or exercise?'' she asked, and more hands went up.
Nelson leaned forward. Her message was deliberate, emphatic: "I recommend, you start thinking of yourselves as athletes. Claim it. I guarantee you will change the way you walk, hold yourself. ... If you think like an athlete and act like an athlete, you will be a good role model for your children.''
The advice hung in the hushed air at the 11th Annual Celebrate Girls Luncheon, where the 225 attendees paid $100-a-person to support Girls, Inc. of Schenectady and to hear Nelson.
Having grown up in a time when women's participation in competitive "male'' sports, like their position in the workplace, was more challenged than encouraged, Nelson did it anyway. She has been a swimmer since age 6, and was a captain and leading scorer on the Stanford University women's basketball team in 1978, before graduating with a degree in psychology. She went on to play for professional teams in France and the United States, and later earned a master's degree in health.
The former editor of Women's Sports and Fitness magazine, she is an avid golfer, runner and swimmer, is a nationally syndicated sports columnist, has authored numerous articles on women, gender and sport, and recently finished her fourth book, "The Unburdened Heart, 5 Keys to Forgiveness & Freedom,'' (Harper San Francisco, 2000).
A more equal world: Meanwhile, girls' exposure to competitive scholastic sports has boomed since the adoption in 1972 of Title IX, an amendment to federal education law requiring equal opportunity in sports at schools receiving federal aid. Since then, the number of American girls involved in interscholastic sports jumped -- from about 300,000 to 2.4 million in 1997.
This winter at Mohonasen High School in Rotterdam, the number of girls in sports was expected to equal the boys -- 130. As at the other 10 Suburban Council schools, including Bethlehem, Niskayuna and Colonie, Mohonasen girls have their choice of six or seven competitive sports a school year, now including lacrosse.
"I think it was a long time coming,'' said Thomas McCarthy, athletic director at Mohonasen High School and a former Guilderland coach. "I think it's cultural. There has been a huge change in the last 50 years in the role of women, and the sports change kicked in. I think in a certain sense (sports) then became a factor in accelerating the growth in society.''
There remain some acculturation issues.
The principles: Like the old male athletic paradigm, Nelson sees tremendous potential for character development in competition. But she's also seen the downsides, and so advocated seven principles for athletes -- for everyone -- to ensure a healthy experience: Love your body; compete for what you want; give yourself permission to win; give yourself permission to lose; identify teammates and support them; see opponents as opportunities; and forgive yourself immediately for all mistakes.
"Competition. Women have negative conceptions of this and with good reason,'' Nelson said. "That word often connotes stepping on others. Competition really means 'to seek with.' ... This is what athletes know. That's why athletes shake hands afterward, regardless if they win or lose.''
Sport is a tricky enterprise, Nelson added in a phone interview. "It's tricky because you're pushing your body to achieve. If you push hard, you succeed. If you push too hard, you hurt yourself. There's still too much emphasis on winning.''
Hand-in-hand with the increase in girls' participation have come more positive images of women in sports, like basketball star Sheryl Swoopes and U.S. soccer star Mia Hamm. There are also images of Olympic Swimmer Amy Van Dyken spitting in an opponent's lane in an attempt to intimidate her, said Nelson. "So, we have women who are taking the worst of male sport.''
The downsides: It is that reiteration of the dominant paradigm of competitive sports -- "only the strong will survive,'' "no pain no gain'' and "winning is everything'' -- that presents a challenge to both genders.
"The only downsides for women are the same downsides for men,'' said McCarthy. "If we become so competitive that we lose perspective ... Sometimes we see an overemphasis on winning. I'd like to think that by bringing women in (to sports), we changed that attitude, but I think the opposite has happened.''
A case in point is Samara Barend, who qualified every year in high school for the state meet in cross-country. For the 23-year-old Albany woman, what started out as an activity that fostered fun and discipline later became an obsession.
She had tried out for basketball and soccer, but found her niche running for Vestal High School in Broome County when she was 12.
"I needed to have a sport where I could be at the front of the pack,'' she said.
In eighth grade, she started practicing with high-schoolers, and was placed on the varsity team. She won nearly every race. "That's when Dad started getting involved,'' she said.
Barend says now that she internalized her father's pressure to be the best. In addition to regular after-school practices, she trained twice nearly every day in her father's health club. Protein diets, energy supplements and superstitious rituals, like wearing the same shirt to bed before a meet, became the norm.
Meets weren't social events, they were battlegrounds. Barend, known as "the runner'' in high school, ran through shin splints, ripped quadriceps muscles and anemia. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she ran as a freshman, Barend was diagnosed with Osgood Schlater Disease, a disease affecting ligaments and muscles in the knee. She suffered as much as she could initially, then she took a good look at how she was approaching her sport.
"Finally, I realized that running was selfish,'' she said. "I was contributing to a team but I also wasn't. I wanted to do something that contributed to others.'' She shifted her focus to academics and politics, competed less, and ran mostly for fun.
In the cultural evolution of the past few decades, even the most violent contact sports have opened to girls and to women.
Lynn Snowden Picket, author of "Looking for a Fight: A Memoir'' (The Dial Press, 2000), halted her career as a boxer after realizing she came to the sport feeling like she had something to prove that would determine her self-worth.
Nursing a bandaged face from a fight against her first female opponent, and watching a match, she was reminded " ... of how close I came to damaging myself permanently, all to prove how fearless I was, to settle a score that was started back in the sixth grade when I was pushed off the swings by a bully. ... I wanted to feel powerful, to take up the world, to stop apologizing. That I thought I could do this by learning how to fight now strikes me as ludicrous and deranged.''
Boxing, a sport that centers around physical beating, was not worth it, she concluded.
The upsides: Then again, when sports are played with the right principles in mind, the qualities they foster are indispensable, according to Nelson.
"Employers look for female athletes to hire. They are leaders, team-players, risk-takers, confident. They communicate well,'' she said.
Barend, who still competes occasionally, chalks up her various positions in leadership roles to sports involvement. On Friday, she was resting from her most recent position as Hillary Clinton's statewide neighborhood program director, which came to an end last week.
So what has she learned from competitive sports? That winning isn't everything, she said, but added that you can't win unless you believe you can.
"Like in life, you constantly have negatives,'' she said. "You have to say to yourself, 'I'm going to win.'
Bethlehem parent Pat Seely, listening to Nelson at Girls, Inc., said she has three daughters, two of whom play soccer. "Guys have been gaining confidence from sports for years,'' Seely said. "And now the girls are doing it.''
Confidence to pursue dreams, or as members of Girls, Inc., would say, "the right to prepare for interesting work and economic independence.''
For Nelson, that went beyond sports to writing. As a girl, she composed stories. "There was a lot of discouragement,'' she said. "My brothers told me my stories were silly.''
At Stanford University, she recalled looking at the English courses and cringing for fear of failure. "I wouldn't take them,'' she said.
But after graduation, at age 24, something snapped. "I didn't want to be 84 years old and look back on my life and say, 'I wanted to be a writer, and I never pursued it.' ... I applied my sports' discipline to writing.''
Nelson got a writing coach, and after working through numerous failures, reached her goal.
Ten-year-old Chelcy Moore, one of several Girls, Inc. members listening to Nelson last week, said she can relate. Even after she was discouraged from playing basketball by those who didn't think she was good enough, she persevered. Now, two years later, she won't stop playing until she gets sick of it. "Basketball is fun,'' she said. "When you get tired of doing it is when you cross the line.''