When you’re young, you can get used to others telling you what you can and can’t do, however, Grove City High School junior Francesca Lanese doesn’t let anyone or anything keep her from doing what she loves.
Lanese has been wrestling for four years now and won the first-ever Ohio Girls State Wrestling Tournament last February. Now, she is paving the way to get more girls involved in this male-dominated sport.
Lanese chose to join wrestling, a winter sport, following her volleyball season. It seemed to be a good fit because of her martial arts experience in jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai.
Although the sport is expanding for female athletes, Lanese’s opponents are primarily boys, especially during the school season. This made her parents apprehensive when Lanese told them her intentions to join the team.
“I can’t say they were ecstatic,” Lanese says. “It’s kind of a hard sport for girls to get into.”
Her mother, Laura Lanese, says her concerns eased when she saw her daughter wrestle against boys.
“I love it when she beats them,” she says.
Laura says it brings her comfort to know that wrestling is teaching her daughter self-defense tactics.
Lanese says she trains for wrestling twice a day during the competition season and three to four times a week in the offseason.
Lou Demas, Lanese’s offseason trainer, has been working with Lanese for two and a half years.
“Her strive to get better is the same (as boys) and I think that’s what stood out to me the most,” Demas says.
Lanese says she stays motivated to improve as a wrestler by focusing on the bar set by her opponents on the wrestling mat.
“I know there’s always going to be someone out there that can beat me, and I want to keep working until I’m that person out there that they’re worried about,” she says.
Ryan Mitchell, Lanese’s coach at Grove City High School, says Lanese is breaking the mould of the sport with her wrestling style.
Mitchell says most female wrestlers enter into a lower weight class to level the playing field with their male opponents. Lanese, however, wrestles in the middleweight class, which is almost unheard of for a female wrestler, Mitchell says.
“It’s like fast, physical chess. You just have to think about what you are doing,” Lanese explains.
When Lanese won the girls’ wrestling tournament in February, her coaches and parents were ecstatic with her accomplishment. While Lanese was also excited by her success, she says she was more excited to see the way younger girls came out to watch and see that their gender doesn’t have to stop them from doing what they set their sights on.
Mitchell says the tournament was a great experience for him to see a different side of wrestling, too.
“It wasn’t a girls’ wrestling tournament, it was just a wrestling tournament,” Mitchell says.
Grove City High School has hosted its first girls-only introduction to wrestling meet to get more young women interested in the sport. Lanese hopes to see more women in wrestling in the upcoming years, and her coaches and trainers do, too.
“Generally, a lot of wrestlers, they come because their dads wrestled. Well, I think that in 10 or 15 years you’re going to see a lot of wrestlers who are wrestling out there on the mats because their moms wrestled,” Demas says.
Maddie Gehring is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
