It’s Valentine’s Day morning, and the group chat of the Bay Shore varsity all-girls wrestling team is blowing up. Members of the inaugural squad are sending funny GIFs back and forth, in the jovial spirit of the holiday, before (and OK, probably during) school. But in the afternoon, as the team trickles into their practice room, located in the basement of a local elementary school, one member is distraught.
“A little kid lost their Valentine’s Day card!” Moura, 13, cries to her coach, and anyone else who will listen. She found the wayward card on a staircase and can only imagine how sad the kid must be at this very moment, frantically looking for their precious love token.
“Moura, it’s OK,” her coach, Amber Atkins, 27, says sternly. “Focus.”
And just like that, Moura shifts her gaze from her coach to the mat. She’s ready to wrestle.
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The Bay Shore girls varsity wrestling team, located in Bay Shore, New York, is the first all-girls varsity wrestling team in the state. Their practice space has been a wrestling room since the 1960s, and smells exactly how you’d imagine: musky, the faint hint of sweat and friction, a place where bodies have been pushing, pulling, and perspiring. The two mats take up almost the whole basement room, save for a small sliver of concrete where the athletes can sit on a bench or plug in their phones to listen to music while they warm up. Lining the walls are tattered black-and-white photographs of teams past — all boys — posing defiantly in their singlets (tight, spandex-like uniforms), looking stoic.
Sitting in the dimly lit, almost dungeon-like room surrounded by the history of Bay Shore youth wrestling, it feels fitting that this space would be the home of the state’s history-making all-girls team. For four months, six days a week, they’ve been surrounded by pictures of male wrestlers as they pave their own way in a male-dominated sport.
“[This team] was always a hope. It was a dream of mine,” Atkins tells Teen Vogue. “I always dreamed of having this opportunity; I just wasn’t sure it would happen in my lifetime. But you know, the opportunity came faster than expected, so we had to kind of saddle up and run with it.”
Atkins says it took a couple of years for the thought of an all-girls wrestling team to come to fruition, which just started this past November. (“My athletic director really put in a ton of leg work and was super persistent.”) But, she says, considering the amount of time that typically goes into creating a new school program — securing funding, obtaining board of education approval, finding a coach — the team was formed much faster than most. “It was really pushed along because it was really supported by the community, which is great,” Atkins says.
The community’s support was, in part, a reaction to a growing interest in women’s wrestling nationwide. In 1990, 112 girls participated in high school wrestling, according to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. In the 2016–17 school year, there were 14,587 girls wrestling across the country. In 2019 there were 55 college women’s wrestling teams in the country, and at least 16 more will participate in the 2020 season. And while an all-girls club team in the Bay Shore area already existed prior to this season, if a girl wanted to represent her high school on the wrestling mat, she would have had to join the boys’ team.
Now there are 18 girls wearing Bay Shore on their backs when they hit the mat, ranging from 7th to 12th grade. Half of the athletes are seasoned wrestlers, and half are brand-new to the sport.
“It did help a lot that I did have some experienced wrestlers,” Atkins, who is no stranger to the mat herself, says. Her father is one of three coaches for the Bay Shore boys varsity wrestling team, and after going to those practices and getting some at-home training, she started wrestling at age 10. “I wrestled boys my whole career,” she says. It was a necessity.
“To me it was pretty normal — I grew up with all boys. I grew up around all of them; they were like my best friends,” she says. “There was really no difference between them and myself: We all worked hard; we all went to the same practices; we all did the same thing. They were all very accepting of me, and we grew up wrestling together, and it was never really questioned.”
That mentality — that Atkins, a girl, wrestling just like the boys was normal and above interrogation — permeates the very core of her team.
“Honestly, that we would be ‘making history’ never came to mind,” Gabby, 15, tells Teen Vogue. “I was just like, ‘Hey, I like this sport, I’m going to do it.’’ The youngest of two by a significant number of years (her older sister is 30), Gabby says her father got her into “every sport possible because he had wanted me to be the best I can be.”
Gabby has played basketball, gymnastics, softball, lacrosse, soccer, swimming, diving, tae kwon do, Shodokan, field hockey, track, pole vault, weight lifting, cheerleading, and football but says wrestling is the sport she’s most passionate about. She hopes to obtain a wrestling scholarship so she can continue to compete in college.
“I’m aggressive. That’s why I also liked football, but I can control it in wrestling,” she says. “I’m a little more free, and wrestling is all on you. I rely on Coach, because she’s my support system, but otherwise I’m the only one on the mat. No one else is holding my hand.”
Like Coach, Gabby had been wrestling with boys and against boys until this year. And like her coach, she has had opponents forfeit because she’s a girl. “I had those many times, but one: A forfeit is a win for me, so either way I’m like, ‘OK, that looks good on my record,'’’ she says. “Two: They get teased for not wrestling me. But you also have the guys who come on the mat and shake my hand smiling, because they think they’re going to win.”
When asked what it feels like to beat a boy, Gabby smiles her own sly smile. “Exciting. So exciting.”
For a multisport athlete like Gabby, the idea of an all-girls wrestling team was hardly foreign. But for others, joining the team took a little convincing.
“I heard it in the announcements and I was like, ‘That’s cool,” Genesis, 17, tells Teen Vogue. “But I came in a week late, after the season started, because I didn’t know how to feel about wrestling. My mom wasn’t very supportive at first, but then I ended up talking to my dad and he said I should really try it, that it’s something new, and that I was going to make history with it.”
Genesis, who lives with her mom and her two younger brothers, ages 11 and 3, says she was scared she was going to get hurt — a fear her mother shared. “She was like, ‘You’re going to break something’ and ‘I paid money for your teeth so you better not break them.’ But I started and she asked if I liked it, and I did, so she supported me.”
Genesis hasn’t broken any teeth, but she has gained a level of confidence she didn’t have prior to stepping on the mat. “I was very insecure about my weight and about how I look,” she says. “But now it’s like, ‘OK, there are people who are the same as me.’ I can be more secure now.”
The mat has also become a sanctuary for Genesis, who says it helps take her mind off of what’s going on in her life. “At home and at school, there are, like, two different stresses that I like to escape,” she explains. And within that escape, a new way of thinking has emerged that allows Genesis to succeed when she steps off the mat, too.
“When I’m on the mat, I don’t give up. And it’s the same with school, too,” she says. “It all counts in the effort you give. The effort you give is going to get you somewhere. If you don’t try, you’ll just get pinned right away, and that’s just how it is with life in general. If you don’t keep going, then you’re not going to make it.”
It’s not just the intricacies of the sport that teach determination, work ethic, inner strength, and perseverance. Yes, by mere design wrestling tests you physically and mentally. “You need the upper-body strength of a swimmer, you need the legs of a soccer player, and you need the endurance of a track runner,” Atkins says. “So it really is, like I said, it’s the most physically taxing sport on your body.” But the team dynamic of this specific individual sport lends itself to the kind of atmosphere that is as challenging as it is motivating.
“Wrestling is a very unique sport because as much as it’s a team sport, it’s an individual test as well,” Atkins explains. “Because you train as a team, you practice as a team, but when it’s your turn to wrestle on the mat, it’s just you and your opponent, and that’s when it becomes individual. When you lose a match, you have your teammates to kind of fall back on — to lift you back up, to get you back in the spirit, to get you to wrestle your next match. Because I’ll tell you, sometimes when you lose a big match, it’s hard to get back out there.”
For Maria, 17, an only child born and raised in Bay Shore, it’s the family she has found in her teammates and coach that has helped her stick with the sport.
“I wanted to quit the first day,” she says. “It can be really frustrating when you can’t do it. I’m the crier of the team — the first day I cried. The second day I cried. I’m better now, but when it’s a bad day and I can’t take someone down, I get frustrated. But everyone is like, ‘Are you OK?’ It’s never like, ‘Oh, why is she crying?’ It’s always supportive.”
What Maria has gained from not quitting far surpasses the moments (including Coach making them run for 30 minutes straight) when moving forward seemed impossible. “I was talking with my teacher today, and she said that she saw a lot of confidence building up through wrestling,” she says. “I can tell that I’ve grown a lot and I don’t give up as much, and I feel like even my grades have been getting better. My first day of wrestling I was so negative to myself. I would be running and be like, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this.’ Now I just keep trying to push myself.”
Of course — like any family — the athletes don’t always get along. “We’ve cried. We’ve argued. We’ve screamed. We’ve not spoken to each other. We’ve done it all, but we always find our way back to each other, and that’s what a family is,” Kaela, 17, tells Teen Vogue. One of three seniors on the team, Kaela joined with her younger sister after a member of the boys football team she was managing suggested she manage the boys wrestling team, too.
“I talked to the [boys wrestling] coach and he said, ‘Sure, but wouldn’t you rather wrestle?’ And I said, ‘What? Grown men?’ But then I learned about the all-girls wrestling team, went to the meeting, and decided to try it.”
Like many of her teammates who had never wrestled before, the first practice was difficult for Kaela (“The first day of wrestling was really hard. I was like, ‘I’m going to die.’ But I’m dramatic and I came back”), which is why she resents the opinion of some that the girls team doesn’t work as hard as the boys team or is in some way inferior. “People have made comments like, ‘The girls don’t work as hard as the boys’ and [that] we work less than them and we are trying to be like them and why are we trying to take over? People have said that stuff to me,” she explains. “But I go to practice six days a week and work my butt off. I feel like the girls work 10 times harder because we have to work for people’s respect.”
Women’s sports often receive less support and recognition than men’s — in the 2019 gender discrimination lawsuit filed against U.S. Soccer on behalf of the women’s national team, it was alleged that not only was the men’s team paid much more than what the women were paid, U.S. Soccer apparently did not promote or market the women’s team as frequently or sufficiently as the men’s. And while Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education programs or activities based on sex, was an attempt to level the playing field, women still receive less support, less viewership, and face stigma in sports.
Still, Kaela believes her and her teammates' hard work will pay dividends, both on and off the mat. While the bleachers aren’t packed for the girls’ tournaments the way they are for the boys', she says next year the team is going to “blow up.” Which is why, in many ways, it’s hard for her to come to terms with the fact that it’s her senior year and she won’t be on the team when it does.
“I don’t want to leave,” she says. “Today Coach and I were talking, and I was like, ‘How am I going to graduate and you’re gonna be an adult and I’m going to be an adult? How am I going to call you Amber? You’ll always be Coach to me.’ I’ve grown that respect, that love for her, to where I don’t want to know what it feels like not to be on Bay Shore girls varsity wrestling.”
Of course, Kaela can’t imagine a life without the team members she has spent four months of her final high school year with, either — the very people who have all helped her see, and value, her worth. “In my life, I have been through a lot. And going through stuff as a teenager in society really does tend to weigh on your self-esteem and your confidence,” she says. “I think I’m pretty, but then I’ll see a post on Snapchat or Instagram and it’ll really put me down. And then I’ll come to practice that day and the girls will be like, ‘You look so pretty today!’ And I’ll be like, ‘Whoa! That was just a compliment!’ I’ve never really had that before.”
“I’ve never been this in shape in my life. I’ve never felt this confident in my life,” she continues. “I wore a dress to school yesterday for Black History Month, and I never would have worn that dress before. Wrestling really did give me confidence that I did not have.”
And that confidence is something Kaela hopes other black girls can gain from the sport as well. “Our team is filled with different races, but I am the darkest-complexion girl on the team. So I have thought about other girls who look like me looking out and seeing, ‘Hey, I can be like her.’ And I want that to happen.”
Moura pulls up her black flame socks (“My mom told me to wear matching socks today. She said it would be smart”), asks her coach to fix her hair, and tightens the shoelaces on her wrestling shoes before hitting the mat for warm-ups. She joins her teammates, who are running the perimeter of the mat, following instructions yelled out by Atkins. “Jog! Sprint! Step inside! Outside! Shot! Sprint! Jog! Mountain climbers! Takedowns!” The focus on Moura’s face remains, but every once in a while, if you’re paying attention, you can see a slight smile emerge. She’s having fun.
“My whole family wrestles,” she tells Teen Vogue later, barely out of breath after throwing and being thrown by her fellow teammates. “I have an older brother, a younger brother, and my dad wrestles, too. When I was in fifth grade I realized I was missing out because my whole family was in the wrestling room all the time and I was doing nothing.”
Now Moura is obsessed with wrestling (“Wrestling and food — those are my two motivations”), and while she, like many others, originally believed wrestling to be exclusively a boys' sport, has since realized that it can be, and is, for everyone.
“My number one favorite part about wrestling is that anyone can wrestle,” she says. “You can be a tiny little twig and you can wrestle, and you can be bigger and you can still wrestle. It’s just a really good sport for boys and girls, and I feel like that’s something people don't really get to understand yet. And I hope that gets to change in the future.”
“Last year I’d watch men’s wrestling every night before I went to sleep. And now I’m watching women’s wrestling, besides the Olympics. So I think that’s really cool,” Moura continues. The sport is expanding rapidly, which is why Moura is ready and impatiently waiting for more people to realize that wrestling is for girls too.
“People come up to me sometimes and they’re like, ‘Oh, wrestling is not a girls’ sport. Only dudes do that,” she says. “But, like, what does girls' sport even mean? I understand that not everyone is going to like it, but I wish everybody did. I wish that these ‘Oh, I wish this wasn’t a sport for girls’ [comments] would kind of disappear. And hopefully by the news and everybody talking about it and the sport growing, sooner or later it’ll be just like girls’ soccer: Nobody even thinks about it. That's what I hope.”
Credits:
Photographer: Emma Trim
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