By: Charlis Vega

The University of Saint Mary is introducing their first full girls team October 26 in the Ryan center in their Blue and Gold meet.

The first women’s wrestling team with 14 members are mainly composed of freshmen only one junior and a graduate assistant on the team. Each team member will  compete in their own weight class in March during nationals. Both the mens and womens team has their own facility on Kickapoo street which was offered to the head men’s wrestling, Coach Kearney, by the president, sister Diane. Coach Kearney has been working on the facility since 2016 while coach Powell , the women’s wrestling coach has been working on it since August of 2018. The facility now has a weight room, two locker rooms, sauna room and the matt room. The facility had been a catholic elementary school and had been unused for five years until coach Kearney took over three years ago.

 Both coach Kearney and coach Powell are working hard on transforming the old school which is now home to both the USM wrestling teams. Coach Powell was given the task of recruiting the girls team to help coach Kearney with the workload of preparing for the 2019-2020 season when he gave her this task, he asked her to find wrestlers who were wrestling for the right reasons.

Coach powell states what she was looking for in her recruiting process, “As we talked to each wrestler, we looked for a few key things about them, obviously other than the fact they were student athletes who wrestled. Personality was a big trait for me, finding key attributes is very difficult. We were not just out looking for individual wrestlers but a team that could help each other grow and in turn help the program grow.”

Coach Powell continues to state that the key attributes in a wrestler is honesty, confidence, enthusiasm, passion and ambition. Both coaches are very excited for this wrestling season for both the mens and womens teams due to their new facility which will help to contribute to the growth and development of both teams.

Charlis Vega is a freshman at the University of Saint Mary and is majoring in English.