The 1st annual CMS Women’s Wrestling City Championship was held on Thursday January 23rd at Ballantyne Ridge High School. The event showcased the skill of 115 women wrestlers from 16 Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in 12 weight classes.
Olympic Wrestling won the day overall with a combined 101.0 total points beating runner-up East Meck Wrestling by a 10 point margin.
INSPIRATION FOR THE EVENT
With women’s wrestling continuing to grow over the last few years in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and across the state event organizer and East Meck Athletic Director Jason Fowler wanted to give these wrestlers more chances to compete:
“Anytime we can give our female athletes more opportunities to compete, I think that’s why we did it. Looking at the numbers and seeing that we wouldn’t have enough participants to wrestle in the actual conference tournaments. I felt like the female athletes deserved something of their own and that’s where this idea came from.”
MAKING HISTORY
Participating in the first all-women wrestling tournament for Charlotte-Mecklenburg is a big deal for wrestlers and coaches alike who are dedicated to growing the sport for women athletes. Prior to these types of events women wrestlers went to male dominated events for the sport.
This event gave these women the opportunity to create a traditional event all their own.
Butler Wrestler Nevaeh Espaillat is one of those athletes who had the opportunity to take the mat on Thursday:
“I’m a multi sport athlete and growing girls sports is a big deal to me. Having this opportunity to be one of the first girls wrestling in the conference tournament is huge.”
GROWING WOMEN’S WRESTLING
Fowler wants to see the event continue to grow for years to come in Charlotte-Mecklenburg:
“Absolutely, if we can hopefully next year it will be twice as big, and either bring it back here or highlight one of our other great schools in CMS and have it there, but we plan on keeping this going because everybody seems to really appreciate it is having a great time with it.“
Fowler also discussed how the community has responded to the event:
“You know, everybody again loves to see our female athletes getting opportunities, bringing in a community partner from the wrestling community, youth wrestling community has being huge, too, because now they’re able to go and from the girls seeing this and getting the excitement, start pulling more girls from a younger age to introduce them into the sport and now that NCAA is sanctioning women’s wrestling, we’re hoping that this will be one of the next sanction sports in North Carolina and hopefully doing things like this can play a part in that.”
ENCOURAGING FUTURE WRESTLERS
The key to growing any sports is increasing the amount of athletes that participate. This is an important step toward women’s wrestling becoming sanctioned by the NCHSAA.
Olympic Wrestler Jayden Holmes has one simple piece of advice for women who are hesitant to try the sport:
“Just go out there and do it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to like it. But I promise you, you will.”
Olympic Coach David DeLaO also has advice for young women wanting to try wrestling:
“Don’t knock it knock until you try it, come out, go to a practice, see if you like it. hang out for a couple days and give it a fair shot. and then go from there and if you know somebody that’s interested, just cheer them on and come out and do the best you can. and just be positive.”
