Dec 23, 2021 3 min read

If you happened to occupy one of the seats in the Canon-McMillan High School gymnasium Tuesday evening, you were part of an historic event on the gym floor.

The wrestlers there wore the blue-and-gold singlets of Canon-McMillan, but they also sported braids in their hair, and makeup on their faces.

For the first time in the program’s history, girls took center stage and what a night it was. When it was over, Canon-McMillan had a 60-15 victory over North Allegheny in the first club dual meet of the season.

To understand the importance of this event, you must have a long memory. Incorporating girls into wrestling was anathema to the sport in some people’s minds.

And for all the expected reasons.

In the four decades I’ve covered the sport for this newspaper, I’ve seen all the problems and heard all the arguments against including girls in the sport.

The moves of the sport require the hands to be placed on females that made some people, on and off the mat, uncomfortable. Privately, some head coaches threatened to resign if forced to take on females in their ranks. And the sexist attitudes dominated the sport. That was how it was viewed in the 1980s.

Over the decades, however, the number of boys interested in the sport kept falling and the interest of girls who wanted to participate kept rising.

The PIAA, which talked a good game when it came to females on boys teams, did little to excelerate their participation.

Until slowly but surely, females became bigger and stronger and more knowledgable about the rules of the sport. It began to make more sense, especially to a coach’s won-lost record, to have as many weights filled as possible.

Anything would be better than forfeits, which were, and still are, the biggest threat to the popularity of the sport.

More and more, females were turning up on rosters. What were no more than curiosities are now becoming important pieces to the team.

And the more they wrestled, the better they got.

In one of the surprising results of this year’s Chartiers-Houston Tournament, Ana Malovich of Butler took third place at 106 pounds after tearing up a wrestler from South Side Beaver. Malovich has the talent to become the first female state qualifier from the WPIAL.

Because Canon-McMillan is a club team, any female wrestler can compete on the boys team and even start for the varsity if they can win a wrestleoff. There were no clearly defined weight classes for the dual meet with NA but that idea has been drifting around the boys teams for years.

But what had to strike you is the number of wrestlers on the Canon-McMillan girls roster, 21, more than many Class 3A boys teams can attract.

Right now, only four schools have girls wrestling in the WPIAL: Canon-McMillan, North Allegheny, Norwin and Connellsville. The PIAA requires 100 club teams to be established before it will recognize the sport. There are about 30 club teams across the state but many other schools have shown interest.

If that happens, and the feeling here is that it might still be a couple years down the road, then the path blazed by the Terri Hardings and Malissa Morts of the sport will finally bear fruit.