Watching a bloodied and shaken eighth-grader continue to fight after sustaining a broken nose, Coach Donnie Stephens was impressed.
What he heard later sealed his admiration. Instead of sitting out the rest of the season while the break mended, the kid kept going -- knowing it would have to be re-broken later in order to set properly.
Stephens said he knew then "we had a real wrestler" coming into his program at West Covina High. Only in this case, it was a 90-pound, 13-year-old girl.
Her name is Norine Cruz, now a 98-pound, 17-year-old senior and the top-ranked female wrestler in California in her weight class.
Cruz is one of nearly 5,000 girls wrestling this season nationwide, according to the U.S. Girls Wrestling Assn. That's up from 3,700 last year and marks a more than threefold increase in the last five years.
Looking back, Cruz considers the decision about her nose as "a no-brainer." Missing matches, she said, is never a serious consideration.
Today, she will be among more than 100 girls from schools across the state competing at Thousand Oaks High School in the fifth annual Williams Cup, one of the nation's largest and longest-running girls-only wrestling tournaments.
The event is a welcome departure for many participants, because the girls spend most of the rest of the season competing against boys. There are no girls' teams in California.
Today's tournament is one of about a dozen such events statewide, a reflection of the rapid rise in the sport's popularity among girls.
In 1997, the first year the USGWA held a national championship, 116 girls participated. The next year, 272 competed. Last year, there were 604.
Opportunities at the college level are also rising. Seven U.S. colleges and universities and more than 20 in Canada offer women's wrestling. Ten years ago, there were none.
And this summer, for the first time, women's wrestling will be a medal sport in the Olympics, which is expected to result in participation soaring again.
"I could guarantee that NBC is going to put it on in prime time," said Doug Reese, the women's coach at the University of Minnesota at Morris, the first U.S. college to offer the sport. "It's going to sell beer ads. Who doesn't want to see women in singlets doing battle? But the novelty will wear off and people will see it's a great sport. A lot of girls are going to want to try it."
Jen Kellogg, a freshman who wrestles for San Marino High, sings in the school choir, has a leading role in the school play and carries a 4.0 grade-point average. She enjoys shopping and movies, and took piano lessons as a youngster.
But she is transformed when she slips into a wrestling singlet and strides into the musty room to lock horns with sweaty boys.
"I'm not a girlie-girl or anything, but I'm actually quite feminine," Kellogg said.
Cruz, by the way she handled her broken nose, had somewhat proved her toughness when she arrived at West Covina. But she still heard whispers: She wouldn't last; she couldn't take it; she would never win; she was only doing it to meet boys.
Countless times she told smart alecks that no, there wasn't any mud, oil or Jello in this wrestling.
"People talk all this bull about you," Cruz said. "That just makes me want to prove them wrong. If you give up, then they were right, so it makes you work harder."
The emergence of girls in contact sports traditionally reserved for boys is a recent phenomenon. Water polo gained official status for girls in 1996-97 in Southern California; around the country, girls also now play ice hockey, lacrosse and occasionally football.
For female pioneers, cracking the wrestling room door has been only one hurdle.
Despite its rise in popularity, girls' wrestling is sanctioned only in Texas and Hawaii.
The California Interscholastic Federation's Southern Section requires that at least 20% of member schools field teams before it will sanction a sport for championships. In Southern California, that is roughly 110 schools.
Although a substantial number of girls wrestle on boys' teams, only a handful of schools would have enough to fill out girls-only squads.
But several coaches are lobbying for a way around the rule, arguing that many more girls would participate if the sport was official.
"It's been a Catch-22 for a long time," said Shannon Yancey, a former national champion and founder of the Thousand Oaks tournament. "It gets better and better every year, but they're making us jump through a bunch of hoops. They want to be sure there will be enough girls."
Complicating the movement are coaches who insist that girls have no place in the wrestling room.
San Marino Coach Daren de Heras said that earlier this season an opposing coach opted to forfeit his team's 103-pound match against Kellogg rather than have its boy compete against a girl.
Some girls' proponents admit to previously having reservations.
"I'm old-fashioned and raised conservative," Diamond Bar Coach Jack Cooprider said. "I didn't want to let girls on my team."
