For the first time in 30 years, the Santa Clara Bruins boys’ wrestling team is league champion. Not to be overshadowed by their male counterparts, all seven lady Bruins wrestling for Santa Clara managed to qualify for CCS! No matter who was on the mat, the Bruins were pinning their ears back and pinning their opponents to the floor.
Did either the Bruins coaches or the student athletes themselves see such a successful season coming?
“Seeing how many kids we had in the offseason and looking at the weight classes, I was thinking we actually stand a really good chance at taking league,” chimed Bruins Head Coach Nicholas Garcia. “For me, it was very exciting to see us finally take it. As long as I’ve been coaching, we have always been taking second or third. That was even back when I wrestled in 2003. We had always been close but had never gotten the championship. Really happy to see this happen for these kids. Watching it in real time was really fun.”
“I think you come into every season hoping for the kids to just do their best,” remarked Assistant Coach Kenji Arai. “To be honest, I don’t think I was paying attention to where we stood. I tend to emphasize with the kids not to worry about outcomes, worry about the things you have control over and wrestling hard. I do think we looked at our group of seniors and thought we had a pretty decent core of guys that should they have a good season and stay healthy, then anything is possible. The way they did it, doing it against a rival, is pretty sweet.”
Junior Natalie Nguyen, who competes in the 100 lb. weight class, spoke about beating Wilcox to clinch the league title and being a part of a trendsetting girls’ team.
“I cried hearing ‘Santa Clara Bruins are the El Camino League Champions,’” admitted Nguyen. “That was quite an experience beating Wilcox. And it’s so cool, the girls’ success we’ve had too. Knowing that you are a girl in a male-dominated sport, it’s empowering; it brings me confidence. I can proudly say that I wrestle.”
Senior Kyla Macartney, wrestling at the 110 lb. weight class, echoed Nguyen on being part of such an historic girls’ wrestling team.
“I think it’s so cool to be part of a girls’ team in general. In such a male-dominated sport, we can grow this much as a team and get to this point,” said Macartney. “I have been wrestling since my freshman year, and girls wrestling was not this big. Watching the team get bigger and bigger over the years has been really cool to be a part of that.”
Both the boys and girls in the wrestling program seemed equally excited for each other’s success. The captain of the boys’ team is Gyan Nawbatt. The senior’s enthusiasm for his female teammates was palpable and genuine.
“It’s incredible. I remember my freshman year when I first started wrestling, I think there was three girls on the team. There was a very, very small girls team,” noted Nawbatt. “Throughout high school, we practiced with more and more girls. They are just as good as the boys. To be honest, sometimes I joke with my friends that our girls’ team is just as good, if not better than our boys’ team. We have such a great environment where the girls can practice with the boys; they don’t feel shunned away from wrestling.”
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