Posted on 12/19/2004 12:59:24 AM PST by quietolong
Girl Wrestler
Texas teenager Tara Neal insists that girls and boys should be able to wrestle on the same mat.
Filmmaker Diane Zander follows Neal through the last year in which state guidelines allow her to wrestle boys.
It's a year filled with family conflict, pressure to cut weight and fierce policy debates over Title IX, which grants women's athletics proportionality in public schools
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
A no win situation. If you win. You beat up a girl. If you lose. You got beat by a girl.
Some just take a dive.
Is this the message we want to teach boys? It’s OK to throw girls around?
One sad note from the update page:
After joining her high school wrestling team and still not being allowed to practice with or wrestle against boys, Tara decided to leave the team. In 2004, Tara and her boyfriend Andrew had a baby daughter.
Still in school and haveing a kid.
One interesting thing. As I was watching this show. One of my daughters who is a senior in HS ( wrestling is a Very big thing in our school) came in a watched the show.
And I asked her if there’s any girls at our school who want to go out for this. And she said No.
As a matter of fact she said the teem was even trying to recruit some girls for the lower weight classes. So when they went to matches. The other teem would half to forfeit because there was no one in that weight class and the teem would get the points.
They found no takers.
To bad we got some good healthy farm girls ( and I don’t mean fat) around here.
Heck my one daughter here can pickup and fling a 80 lb. bale of hay. ( and goes deer hunting too)
When I took judo as a teenager, I had to throw/get thrown by girls. When I took martial arts as an adult, my practice opponents were often women. I don't see the big deal, but I'm sure there will be plenty of opinions.
We had a girl wrestler on our team when I was a Junior. She was quite and athlete and although she was into the girl power thing, she was very christian and very conservative as well (I attempted to date her the next year but thats another story).
Anyway, She was our 103 Lb wrestler. why is that? She beat the guy trying to be the 103 lb wrestler (a freshman who ended up placing 5th at states 4 years later). She was strong, 103 lbs was very close to her natural weight. We got into some tournaments later in the year and she didnt have to cut weight, could run forever and was very strong for a girl. In her matches, she showed that she was stronger than the guys she was wrestling!!!
It isnt a sexual thing on the mat, it is one on one. Anyone seeing the girl for being a girl and not just as another competitor is wrong on all counts. The girls can hang, if given a chance. At least that is my experience.
I think you mean "team".
besides at 13-14 years old, they shoudl allow the kids to cut weight anyway. at least that is the way they did it at my high school in Ohio. If you were under 16, you werent cutting weight. You either bumped up and beat the guy in the weight class above you or you wrestled JV....
oops darn keyboard
besides at 13-14 years old, they shoudl allow the kids to cut weight anyway
having wrestled with a girl on the team, it isnt that horrible.
The girl I had on my team was just as much one of the guys as anyone else. She tried just as hard, never asked out or dropped out of runs and she was always intense. She would always do what the guys did (with the exception of grabass in the shower) and she won some matches.
If she beat the guys one on one, whats the deal? the better person won the match. If the kid took a dive it is his fault, he had to get the job done no matter who it is against. It isnt personal, its competition
Nope, practice only, not competitive, so I'll have to defer to others on the pros and cons there.
I don't have an issue with girls playing from a competitive standpoint. I simply acknowledge that adolescents being in such close proximity can be problematic. I would have felt very uncomfortable having to grab a girl in a wrestling hold but hey I was a shy kid too.
yeah....
I only had to drill with Rebecca one time during practice, but considering I was much bigger at the time (I was the 215 LB class, she was the 103 LB), she held her own perfectly well.
It is up to the coaches to make sure the kids know it is a competition, because in just a few years, they will be competing with girls for jobs, scholarships and everything else. Gotta start somewhere, but you just cant look across the mat and see a girl. You need to see the girl as another competitor. It probably sounds too simple, but for me, it is really easy.
Yeah Baby!
What do you think about woman in combat? It’s really an off shoot of this.
I was in one of the first 2 west cost squadrons to integrate woman in to sea duty. So I have seen some of the problems first hand.
Given how much gripping and touching is involved (though it is not sexual) in wrestling I do see how this could be allowed right now given this country's lawsuit happy laywers and how high the risk a sexual harassment lawsuit, or sexual assult case would be presently.
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laywers = lawyers
When my wife and I were dating 35 years ago, we wrestled all the time. My children wrestled all the time as they were growing up. This was FUN and TICKLING each other and so forth. FWIW, I do not support this. Further, I do not support women in the military if they are there to hunt husbands. Military is to execute WAR COMBAT solutions.
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Women will rue the day they tried to train men to view them as competitors.