All photos by Alessandra Bergamin
Sweaty and flushed, Maria Patino picks herself up off the padded floor and storms out of the training room in tears. For the past hour, a dozen or so girls, including Patino, have run laps, done drills and tussled with one another as part of their training for the Albany High School girls’ wrestling team. Beneath her long-sleeved top, Patino’s shoulder is taut with sports tape, bracing an injury she sustained earlier that year.
Today, pushed by her shoulder pain and the stressors of high school, she is on the verge of giving up.
Malinda Ripley, one of the team’s coaches, emerges from the humid training room and crouches beside Patino, now slumped against the wall. Ripley is a high school and college wrestling champion who has competed internationally and is now the women’s director at California USA Wrestling, the state’s official amateur-wrestling governing body.
Together with her fellow coach and husband, Jason Griffin, the pair train the team five nights a week and on weekends, as well as chaperone the group to meets and tournaments across the state and country. As Ripley speaks to Patino, coaxing her back into the training room, she is both comforting and tough. The girls are teenagers, but they are also athletes. Part of Ripley’s role as a coach is to build both physical and mental strength.
The latter is usually the hardest.
Since girl’s high school wrestling began in Hawaii in the late 1990s, the number of young women who wrestle has ballooned from just over 800 to more than 16,000. While many states hold unofficial tournaments, just 14 — six of which joined in 2018 — hold a state-sanctioned championship recognized and run by a scholastic governing body.
In California, where such championships have been held for seven years, the number of schools with girls’ wrestling teams has more than doubled during the past decade. In the San Francisco Bay Area, more than 40 girls’ teams (including the one at Albany High School) are sprinkled across the region. This year, the Albany team won the North Coast Section championship — an area that includes the Bay and as far north as Eureka — and placed within the top 15 at the 2018 California Interscholastic Federation state finals.
Earlier this year, when I began photographing the Albany team, I was interested in capturing the increasing popularity of the sport and highlighting how an otherwise sidelined demographic — teenage female wrestlers — are carving out a space for themselves in a historically male-dominated field.
But week after week, the story that emerged from documenting the end of the team’s season was more about the perseverance, strength and friendship I witnessed than it was about comparing girls’ wrestling with its male counterpart.
Back at Albany High School, Patino rejoined her teammates in the wrestling room. The group alternates between fast stationary runs, wall sits and wrestling drills, in which they lightly grapple with one another on the mat. As they each complete their required reps, yelled to from the sidelines by Griffin, the team members — often led by wrestler Natalia Urbas — cheer for one another with encouraging words, loud claps and sweaty hugs.
At the end of their two-hour training session, the team gathers around their coaches. Ripley reads an inspirational quote from her phone while the girls undo their braids, peel off layers of damp clothing and unlace their soft-soled sneakers. It has been a long two hours of training.
Tomorrow, they will do it all over again.
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