Girls step into the ring for new sport

Senior Maqency Davis is one of the members of Papio South’s first girls wrestling team. Davis started wrestling as a junior at a high school in California, so she already has a season under her belt. Davis has always had an interest in wrestling.

“I liked how it looked and the fact that they looked so smooth while doing all the moves and that they were able to take people down. I thought, connecting it to the real world, it could be really useful if I’m by myself and I need to use things like that, but also it’s a good outlet for any real life stuff I’m struggling with,” Davis said.

Junior Allie Grow will be another member of girls wrestling. Grow has never previously wrestled, so this will be her first season. Grow was never really into the more girly sports, so when she heard about girls wrestling, she thought she’d give it a go.“I just thought maybe, you know what, let’s just try it out. That sounds really fun,” Grow said.

Papio South joins the wave of girls wrestling stemming from Western Nebraska by debuting their first team this season. Last year was the first year girls wrestling became an NSAA-sanctioned high school sport in Nebraska.

Teacher Alexis Madsen, Papio South’s head girls wrestling coach, said the sanctioning was important for the sport.

“Western Nebraska, surprisingly, had already been having women’s wrestling clubs, and they were getting pretty sick of the state not sanctioning it to make it as big of a deal as it should be,” Madsen said. “It was actually way out in the panhandle like Valentine [Nebraska] and smaller towns that really rallied to get it sanctioned. Other states are starting to do it, too, like South Dakota and Iowa.”

Girls wrestling becoming an NSAA-sanctioned sport brings opportunities for high school girls to pursue wrestling in college, meaning more doors are flying open for female athletes to choose their own path to the future.

“Now that it’s sanctioned at a high school level, it’s now sanctioned at a college level. Iowa just sanctioned their first Iowa women’s wrestling team, which is a Big 10 university, and they’re kind of handing scholarships out like candy right now to get their teams built,” Madsen said. “So it’s a huge new opportunity for women, too. If they’re looking for a scholarship for college and they do enjoy wrestling, it’s a whole other tunnel now that they can go down.”

Madsen was previously an assistant women’s wrestling coach at Omaha Central High School. She has been excited to be a part of girls wrestling from the get-go.

“The moment I knew it got sanctioned, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is so cool.’ I just really thought, too, if it’s going to be a woman’s sport, a woman should be involved in some way helping coaching it … I never wrestled personally, but just knew the sport really well, growing up with it,” Madsen said.

Madsen, Davis and Grow are all eager to get more girls to try wrestling.

“We need more girls,” Davis said, “because the more girls that we have, the bigger the sport’s going to be.”

Davis said students should set aside their expectations and just try it.

“The girls that do join wrestling try to spread the word that it’s not as weird as you’d think, and you don’t have to be manly to do the sport. There were a bunch of very feminine girls that I knew. They would come in full face makeup, but they would get you to the ground,” Davis said.

Grow had some reservations before joining wrestling. She was worried about taking rough hits, as most girls would be.

 “It’s not as bad as you’d think it is,” Grow said. “Before going into it, I thought: ‘I’m going to get slammed.’ ‘I’m going to get my butt whooped every second.’ ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ‘It’s going to hurt.’ ‘It’s going to be painful.’ But it’s really not that bad. You think it’s going to hurt, but it hurts for maybe five seconds, but you get back up and you can end up winning.”

Madsen wishes more girls would take the risk of doing something unfamiliar. She talked about the most common things she’s seen when trying to recruit girls.

“I would say from my perspective as a coach … It’s like something is holding them back. They really want to do it, but they’re afraid to go into the unknown, and I have to give them this confidence,” Madsen said. “We’re going to teach you everything. It might be an awkward first year that you don’t know a lot, but the beauty of the sport right now is that a lot of girls don’t know a lot all over the state.”

Madsen is working towards making a change in another reason girls might not join wrestling right away: the weight class of every girl is known. With the way the world is today, Madsen knows that can be a deterrent.

“You do get your weight class announced, and that’s so tough with women in society right now and with social media and the ways we’re supposed to look and being comfortable with your body weight,” Madsen said. “I’m trying really hard to make girls realize that you should just love the sport and love your body, because you earn this body, right? You’re working out every day, whether you weigh 145, 215, 115, you can still kick someone’s butt and you’re strong and that’s super cool… All are perfect. All are great. It doesn’t matter which [weight class] you’re in.”

Grow shows that in a short amount of time, Madsen is achieving her goal.

“It’s definitely made me more confident with my body weight because of how strong I am,” Grow said.

Madsen is also working toward making girls feel comfortable doing something they’ve never done before. A lot of girls are walking into the unknown, and Madsen wants girls to know that it is OK to not know anything at all.

“I wish more girls were more confident that it’s OK to not know everything, because we’re going to give you the goodies and the tools to teach you everything, and you will be successful at it. Just say yes and come and try it out. Don’t feel like, just because you don’t know anything, that you’re not allowed to be here,” Madsen said.

 Taking on big responsibilities as the first head coach for girls wrestling at Papio South, Madsen has a thorough vision of what she expects of herself and her team this season.

“We really need to focus on accepting that it’s OK to look goofy. It’s OK to not be successful in this, because it’s your very first year for a lot of you. … So if you get your first takedown, we’re gonna celebrate that,” Madsen said. “Even if you didn’t win the match, you got your first takedown, right? Even if you got pinned, you now know what it feels like to get pinned. It sucks. You won’t let it happen again, right? So celebrating all those firsts and those little things and making it so fun.…Winning is awesome, right? But it can’t be all about it this first year. This first year needs to be a walk of little celebrations,” Madsen said.

Grow agrees with Madsen’s principle of making things fun. She knows that winning or losing doesn’t define her.

“You’re just there to have fun, and if you win, you win. If you lose, you lose. That’s how the sport is. It’s always going to be win and lose. It’s never gonna be just all winning and all losing,” Grow said.

Even before official practices started, girls were attending open mat sessions and growing as individual athletes and as a team.

“I could just see it in Allie’s face one day, just at practice,” Madsen recalled. “She just came up to me and flipped me over. She had pinned me, and I was like, ‘OK, my girls are comfortable with me.’ They have no problem just to have a little goofiness with me.”

Davis felt that bond within the wrestling team as well.

“[My favorite part is] how close we all are. I feel like, even though we all do our own matches, we’re still a team,” Davis said.

Madsen was excited about her team’s debut and encouraged everyone to be a part of girls wrestling.           

“Even if you don’t see yourself coming out, just come to the very first duel that we have in December,” Madsen said. “There’s going to be so many firsts. You’ll get to sit in a gym and watch the first girl at Papillion-La Vista South pin someone for the first time…. You won’t ever get to be a part of this opportunity ever again, to see all these firsts that we’re going to have at this school, and it’s so cool.”