Hobart freshmen Maddie Lams and Joanna Cantu thought they’d be participating in a different sport in high school.
The cousins grew up in a wrestling-centric family but had their sights set on something else.
“We were going to play basketball,” Lams said.
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One development changed those plans, though.
“It’s because there’s a girls team now,” Cantu said.
Hobart has a girls wrestling team for the first time this season, part of a state and nationwide trend amid rising interest in the sport.
In May, the Indiana High School Athletic Association identified girls wrestling and boys volleyball as “emerging” sports, which paves the way for each to become fully recognized by the IHSAA, complete with a postseason tournament. The next step for these sports is increasing participation to 50% of the IHSAA’s 407 member schools. IHSAA data indicates there were 350 female wrestlers representing 113 schools last season.
Hobart isn’t the only program in the area with a girls wrestling team. Portage has a new team with nine wrestlers on the roster, and Crown Point and Merrillville each has eight wrestlers on its new team, according to the coaches from those programs. Hobart’s roster was up to 15 as of Monday’s practice, with coach Tomas Westberg saying recruiting efforts continue to increase that number.
“We started with a small group of girls, and each practice we have more and more coming out,” Westberg said. “It’s just word-of-mouth that this is fun.”
Cantu has been a central part of that recruiting.
“I’m the one in the hallways asking people if they’re wrestling and telling them they should do it,” she said. “I’ve been telling them that they can quit, but they have to come out for one practice.”
The belief among many is that any girls who come out for one practice will want to stick with the sport.
“It’s been so much fun,” Lams said. “Everyone’s been so nice to each other.”
There’s a camaraderie developing among the girls, a bond being built that couldn’t be formed when they were part of a coed program with many more boys, Westberg said.
“They were trying to get more girls on the team,” he said. “But a lot of them dropped out because they were practicing with the guys and they were new to the sport, so they saw it as intimidating. They felt like they were never going to catch up — they were just falling behind.”
Cantu and Lams are two rare veterans on Hobart’s roster. Erin Swafford, Lams’ mother, is an assistant for the girls team. Cantu’s older sister, Joy, is a sophomore at Merrillville who finished third at 106 pounds at the Indiana High School Girls Wrestling state meet last season.
Joanna Cantu joked about the wrestling mats in the basement of her family’s home and said her father, John, was the primary reason both she and Lams started wrestling.
“He just wanted us to try it out,” Cantu said. “He thought it’d make me a better person in life.”
That’s now the sales pitch Cantu is offering to every potential teammate she passes at school.
“Join girls wrestling and you’ll have so much fun,” she said. “And you’ll get tougher because the mats make life easier.”
Dave Melton is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.