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Girls wrestling tourney hits Napa Saturday

Friday, January 19, 2001

By BARRY GRAHAM
Register Sports Writer

Vintage High and the Napa Valley Wrestling Club will hold the third annual
Napa Valley Girls Classic Wrestling Tournament on Saturday at Vintage
beginning at 9:30 a.m. Weigh-ins will be held from 7:30-8:30 a.m. for
competitors.

The tournament will feature students from Vintage as well as other area
schools that include Vallejo, Jesse Bethel and Hogan. The NVGC tourney is
the second largest in the U.S. as athletes from California, Nevada, Oregon
and Ohio will be competing.

The event is also an opportunity for girls to wrestle against their fellow
females, as opposed to competing against boys as they currently do.

The past years have featured athletes who are some of the best wrestlers in
the country. Past winners of the tournament have included several national
champions.

The tournament also offers opportunities for the less- experienced wrestler,
with place matches through eighth. The NVGC is a double-elimination
tournament for high school girls who are members, in good standing, of their
high school wrestling teams. The tournament will award the top five
wrestlers in each weight class as well as one outstanding wrestler. National
Federation High School and CIF wrestling rules will apply for the event.

Competitors will try to win in 14 weight classes that begin at 99 pounds and
end at 171 pounds. Representing Vintage at the event will be Maika Watanabe
(99), Jessica Hsieh (104), Danni Presley (114), Christie Rafanan (119),
Carina Valle-Santana (123) and Emilee Murphree (136).

"It is a very competitive tournament," said NVWC and NVGC Director Carl
Murphree. "People that go tend to be surprised at how well these girls can
wrestle."

The director goes on to say that the event has grown every year and has a
reputation as being a very competitive event.

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Isle wrestler seeks spot on U.S. wrestling team

By Stacy Kaneshiro
Advertiser Staff Writer 7/12/2000

After just three seasons of wrestling, Clarissa Chun of Kapolei has made great strides.

The 1999 Roosevelt High graduate and two-time state champion hopes to take her biggest one Sunday when she faces 10-time national champion Tricia Saunders for a spot on the United States women’s world team.

The wrestle-off in the 46-kilogram (101.25-pound) class is a best-of-three event that will be held in Las Vegas.

The last time the two competed was in April for the finals of the 2000 U.S. Nationals. Saunders, of Phoenix, Ariz., pinned Chun in the first period. Saunders, who won world titles in 1992, 1996, 1998 and 1999, has not lost to a U.S. opponent on the senior level.

"Hopefully, I’ll do better from the last time I wrestled her," Chun said from Tennessee, where she is visiting a Missouri Valley College teammate. "I didn’t do very well, but I learned from it."

The U.S. national team will compete in the 2000 Women’s World Championship in Sofia, Bulgaria, Sept. 1-3.

Chun qualified for the wrestle-off by beating Julie Gonzales, of Vallejo, Calif., on June 4 at the World Team Trials in Battle Creek, Mich.

Saunders, as the 2000 U.S. Nationals freestyle champion, was supposed to compete in the trials but an injury forced her to postpone her meet until now. As U.S. national champion, she is allowed a request for an extension, according to USA Wrestling.

Wrestling was not Chun’s first sport in high school. She swam as a freshman and sophomore before taking up wrestling at the urging of one of her judo instructors, Kevin Ida, a 1971 state wrestling champion for Kaimuki.

Chun, who turns 19 next month, thought her wrestling career was over after high school. She was deciding among Iowa, San Jose State and Hawai‘i until a scholarship packet from Missouri Valley College, an NAIA Division II school, arrived. She did not decide on taking the offer until about three days before she enrolled there.

Since then, she has placed third at the 2000 University Nationals and won a gold medal at the 2000 Dave Schulz Memorial International Championships. She just returned from France for the Junior Worlds, where "I didn’t to too well," she admitted.

Still, she can’t believe how well she has done with so little experience.

"I didn’t think I’d be up here," Chun said. "My (college) coach said, ‘We’re the Mia Hamms of wrestling.’ It’s hard to believe. This is my first year of freestyle. A lot of these girls have been wrestling for seven or eight years. Coming from Hawai‘i, we never heard of women’s wrestling."

NOTES: Regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s wrestle-off, Chun will train will the U.S. team, she said. She will return home Monday, then head to Northwestern University Aug. 15 for the workouts, she said. . . . Missouri Valley College is one of three collegiate programs with women’s wrestling, according to USA Wrestling. The other two are Cumberland (Ky.) College and Minnesota-Morris.

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State 108-poung wrestling champion Caylene Valdez and other Moanalua High athletes will compete in the OIA East beginning this fall

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Gender equity plan lags, LeMahieu says

Advertiser Staff 7/2000

Schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu wants gender equity goals in Hawai‘i’s public high school athletics to be reached faster and is sending an advisory council back to the drawing board to shorten the timeline.

Wrestling is one of the newest girls' high school sports, holding its first state tournament in 1998. Last year Heather Robertson of Radford (left) defeated Clarissa Calibuso of Moanalua for the 121-pound title.

In a letter to Gender Equity in Athletics Advisory Council members, LeMahieu said the council’s strategic plan that calls for surveys of girls’ interests the next school year and adding girls sports starting in the 2001-02 school year "is unacceptable."

"I really do think that the issue is too urgent and too compelling to wait that long," LeMahieu wrote.

In a preliminary draft of its plan in late May, the council had recommended adding a new girls sport each year starting next school year. But some council members said they didn’t know what new sports girls wanted, so the council changed its plan to call for surveys next year and adding a girls sport annually from 2001-02 to 2005-06.

LeMahieu feels that won’t achieve the Department of Education’s commitment to ensure that girls have equal opportunity to participate in athletics soon enough.

A law recently signed by Gov. Ben Cayetano calls for LeMahieu to submit to the Legislature by Dec. 31 a plan to achieve compliance with federal Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination in education.

The advisory council also proposed using the next school year to gather data in a number of other areas, including participation, equipment and supplies, practices, facilities, coaches and financing to see if girls receive equal treatment.

The strategic plan was submitted to LeMahieu June 2 and his response, mailed to council members last week, will be considered by the council in a meeting today.

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Girls still await equality in public school sports

By Alice Keesing 5/2000
Advertiser Education Writer

Twenty-eight years after a federal mandate for equal opportunity, there are still fewer girls than boys playing sports in Hawaii’s public high schools. And when they do play, girls’ teams have less money and fewer facilities.

The state Department of Education has completed its first-ever review of its compliance with federal Title IX gender-equity mandates in athletics. The 1972 law requires an equal public education for boys and girls, which includes equality in sports opportunities.

The report, released to The Advertiser, shows that:

Of all students participating in public high school athletics in the 1998-99 school year, 59 percent were boys and 41 percent were girls.

Of $790,000 spent on sports supplies and equipment, 68 percent went to boys’ teams and 32 percent went to girls’ teams.

Girls do not have equal use of facilities or locker rooms.

Hawaii has a long way to go to achieve gender equity in sports, said Mary Arace, chairwoman of the Honolulu Committee on the Status of Women, who helped draft the report. But the school system technically is in compliance with Title IX, Arace said, partly because it can show improvement over the years.

The number of girls playing high school sports has increased 139 percent since 1975. Their numbers have been boosted by the introduction of new girls’ sports, including judo, wrestling, and golf.

Things have changed

"It’s so different from when I was an athlete," said Reggie Torres, who coaches junior-varsity football, wrestling and judo at Kahuku High & Intermediate. "We offer a lot more sports now, and not just for girls, for everyone."

Over the past few years, Kahuku has added five girls sports. There is an equivalent girls team for every boys team except football. And even then, Kahuku students are quick to mention that last year’s junior varsity backup kicker was a girl.

Sophomore Savannah Sabido made 11 of her 12 kicks. She said surviving some heavy tackles helped earn her teammates’ respect.

"Boys, they think it’s just their sport," Sabido said. "But once they see a girl out there doing it, they need to know that girls are not just there to cheerlead."

Sabido intends to try out for this season’s varsity team.

Kahuku athletic director Hartwell Lee Loy Jr. said the school is committed to quality sports opportunities for all students.

"Hopefully, through the sports programs, we’re able to teach them some of the skills they need to survive in life," Loy said. "You know, being on time for practice teaches punctuality. The sports also help keep the students off the streets and away from gangs. I think we’ve been pretty successful."

Providing those opportunities means constant fund-raising, Loy said. Kahuku has to raise as much as $12,000 each year to break even.

But even that doesn’t help with the school’s greatest barrier to gender equity, which is facilities, Loy said.

Like most Hawaii schools, Kahuku was built long before Title IX was enacted and before girls’ sports were given the attention they are today. Female athletes at Kahuku have no locker room; they use the physical education locker room instead.

The Legislature recently appropriated $1 million for the school to buy land for an upper campus, including a new gymnasium, athletic fields and courts. The planned facilities will solve the school’s gender-equity issues, but Loy said it will take millions more and several years to complete.

The biggest hurdle

Facilities are the state’s biggest and costliest hurdle to gender equity, according to Arace. Many schools don’t have the land to expand for new facilities even if the money were found, she said. Other schools use the facilities of adjoining county parks and are having to compete for time with a growing number of users.

Everyone agrees that gender equity will come with a large price tag for a department already stretched by a court order to improve special education services and by overwhelming repair and maintenance needs.

"Up front, there’s a lot of commitment on the part of the governor and legislators on gender equity and high school athletics," said Tom Yamashita, director of the department’s Civil Rights Compliance Office. "But when it comes to funding the requirements, it’s going to have to compete with many other important state funding requests."

Even without the facilities, Arace said it will take at least $90 million for basic needs such as more staff and higher salaries. Coaches at Hawaii’s public high schools earn just $600 to $800 a season, whether they’re coaching boys or girls.

The report also calls for more girls sports to counterbalance the number of boys playing football. Possible additions include water polo, flag football and paddling. The Oahu Interscholastic Association already is considering making cheerleading an official varsity sport.

The department has long pointed out that if football is not counted, the percentage of girls playing sports is higher than boys. And although more money is spent on football, the department says football also brings in more money, which is then spent on all sports.

The report reveals that similar sums are spent on boys and girls teams, with the exception of football, wrestling, baseball and softball. For example, $29,000 was spent on boys’ varsity wrestling teams statewide compared to $4,600 for girls’.

The report weighs in on another long-standing argument in sports equality: the state season schedule. Some sports - boys and girls - must play out of season. For example, while the collegiate basketball season is winter, girls in Hawaii play basketball in the spring.

Kahuku basketball star, April Atuaia, said that can put girls at a disadvantage for scholarships, because recruiters may not be scouting while they’re playing. Atuaia recently won a basketball scholarship to the University of Hawaii.

But Arace said aligning all sports with collegiate seasons is unrealistic for Hawaii.

"The reality is that with such limited facilities, if we start switching things around, we may, in fact, decrease opportunities for girls and boys," she said.

Doing better than some

The department has received a handful of gender-equity complaints in the past two years, but none have evolved into formal complaints with the Mainland civil rights compliance office.

And while Hawaii still has not reached equal participation, it is doing better than some other states, Arace said. The percentage of Hawaii girls participating in athletics is equal to national figures published by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

But gender equity advocate Jill Nunokawa says it’s not enough. A civil rights counselor at the University of Hawaii, Nunokawa has loudly criticized the public schools’ sluggish performance in achieving gender equity.

Nunokawa said the report uses the wrong data to measure compliance. For example, girls were not surveyed to discover if the sports they want to play are available, she said. The report recommends such a survey be conducted.

Nunokawa also questions the department’s in-house report of its own compliance.

"They’ve spent the last 10 months writing a self-serving and highly suspect document to protect themselves," she said.

However, Board of Education member Michael Victorino, who helped draft the report, said he was impressed with the wide array of people that the superintendent recruited for the project.

And even Nunokawa agrees that the department is moving in the right direction.

An advisory council is using the report’s recommendations to write a long-term strategic plan for reaching full compliance, which will determine how much it will cost. That plan will be presented to the Board of Education in June.

Gender equity report card

The Department of Education recently reviewed its compliance with federal gender-equity mandates in athletics. It used 11 components of the law to measure sporting equality:

Equal opportunities to compete: Girls’ numbers still lag, but Hawaii is compliant because it has shown improvement.
Equal equipment and supplies: More money spent on boys, but inadequate information to determine compliance.
Equal scheduling of games and practice times: More data needed.
Equal travel and per-diem allowance: Compliant.
Equal opportunity to receive coaching and academic tutoring: Not enough data.
Equal assignment and compensation of coaches and tutors: On assignment, not enough data; on compensation, compliant.
Equal locker rooms, practice and competitive facilities: On locker rooms, not compliant; on quality, availability, use of facilities for practice and competitive events, more data needed; on maintenance and preparation of competitive facilities, compliant.
Equal medical and training facilities and services: Compliant.
Equal publicity: Compliant.
Equal administrative and clerical support: Compliant.
Equal awards and scholarships: Compliant.