Whenever someone talks about a fast growing sport, they tend to talk about girls wrestling. With the new addition to MSHSAA sports, girls wrestling has been the main talking point for quickly expanding sports.
Eagles head coach Kevin Haynes feels very passionate about the expansion of girls wrestling throughout the state.
“The numbers are becoming awesome, and expanding every year,” Haynes said. “Some people always say at first that they don’t like wrestling, when they haven’t even tried it, but when they actually wrestle for the first time after a few practices, they absolutely love it.”
The addition of girls wrestling to MSHSAA started in 2018 and Liberty had only two girls wrestlers. Since then, the popularity of the sport has grown exponentially.
Last year, the girls wrestling program had 15 wrestlers, which is a major difference from this year with an astonishing 21 girl wrestlers.
Kat Zink (11) thought that the expansion of girls wrestling has brought the team a lot closer which made wrestling more comfortable.
“All of us are really good friends this year, and the team is very close already at the beginning of the season which is going to be important for the rest of the year,” Zink said. “We’ve done team bondings outside of school that has brought us even closer together.”
The wrestling program has already accomplished a lot this year with multiple girls placing in the first two meets.
“We have a lot of new really good wrestlers. Ava Hall (10) has taken first in her last two tournaments and this is her first year wrestling,” Haynes said.
One thing that stands out in the girl’s wrestling program is whenever someone gets a pin against someone, they get the honor of wearing a pink hard hat that says, “all I do is pin” and signifies that they won that match.
However, that is not the only tradition that they have had.
“So whenever someone gets a pin, they get to put the hat on, and we’ve done other things like that in the past also,” Haynes said. “One weekend we had these crazy clover shaped glasses, and they just pass it onto the next person that gets a pin after them.”
The girls wrestling season just started so they have lots of more time to get better every day and keep the sport growing.
