With the rise of awareness for gender equality in sports, the emergence of female teams for formerly male-exclusive sports have made their way to Jonathan Alder; one of which was wrestling. Last year, Alder officially established their first ever girls wrestling team, consisting of 10 girls, nine of which had never wrestled before. This year, the girls team consists of 13 girls, including five experienced wrestlers.
One of the returning wrestlers is senior Annie Saxour. Even though the team went in without significant experience, they have shown extreme improvement throughout the season. “At the beginning of the season, there were only a couple girls winning at tournaments,” says Saxour, “and now, we have most girls winning at least one or two matches every tournament, which is really good.”
Head coach Nick Christopher agrees. “When you look at when we started this program two years ago, the only kid that we had on the team that had any kind of experience was Ava Ater. Everybody else last year was a first year kid. So now we’re into two year kids with experience. And then we got several one year kids on the team. So we’re very inexperienced as far as that’s concerned. But the kids have gotten better as this year has gone on, and from last year to this year. You see some improvement from some of those kids that were first year wrestlers.”
Recently, Victoria Bobrova was named Alder’s January Student Athlete of the Month. She is the first JA wrestler this year to receive this honor. Christopher says, “she’s put in a lot of time [during the off season]. She’s worked hard at it.”
Girls wrestling is growing in a positive direction. The sport is still relatively new, but word is spreading, and a small team has been established at the junior high. “There are some kids down at the junior high,” Christopher says, “we need to start building up more numbers down there. But we do have a head coach down there now, which is a huge step in the right direction as a separate program from the boys.”
The girls are looking forward to finishing out their season, and to continue to grow the bonds they have built. “There’s some button heads, but you’ll get that everywhere,” says Saxour, ”I think we have a really, really close team this year, which is really exciting.”
The girls are in action this Sunday, Feb. 9, in the Triad Invitational at Triad High School. It starts at 9 a.m. They are also hosting the OHSAA Sectional Tournament on Feb. 23 at 10 a.m.
