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Ledyard Colonel Wrestling Club Holds First USAWCT Tournament with Girl's Division
On Sunday, March 11, 2007 the Ledyard Colonel Wrestling Club held a late season wrestling tournament and included a girls division. To the best of our collective memory, this is the first time this has been done at a USAWCT tournament. The Ledyard club realized that they were breaking ground and that the turn out would probably not be very large, but decided to step up and offer the girls the opportunity to wrestle other girls. There were 13 girls that registered for this tournament. Hopefully this will be another step that will help make more people in the CT wresling community aware that there are girls wrestling in CT. It would be great to see more clubs offering this opportunity at their tournaments. As it becomes more common, it is very likely that more of the 60 plus high school girls and many more youth girls that wrestle will begin to participate.
USAWCT has had a successful, if small, group of women wrestlers. There were very few girls that were competing with any success prior to the mid 1990's. By 2005 USAWCT had fielded several All American girls in both folk style and freestyle wrestling. In the past few years USAWCT has had three National Champions, Jade Perry from Norwich, Elaina Piroshkov from Greenfield, MA and Stefenie Shaw from Waterford, in the USGWA Folk Style Nationals High School division and the FILA Jr. Nationals. This year USAWCT will again be sending girls from CT to Michigan for the USGWA Nationals at all age levels, to Colorado Springs for the Body Bar FILA Nationals at all age levels and to Fargo, ND for the USA Wrestling Junior Nationals and the Junior National Duals.
One of the primary goals of USAWCT is to encourage more people to participate in and enjoy of our great sport of wrestling. Clearly, if we could really devleop a women's wrestling program and presence in CT we would be opening the door to our sport for many new people. We look forward to having other clubs make the effort to offer a girls division at their tournaments. At this stage the numbers, which we hope and believe will grow, are small enough that it can be run as just another division within any of the existing tournaments. Please consider this as something that your club can do to help promote not only girsl wrestling, but the great sport of wrestling in general!
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