Brotherhood of wrestling
When the high school city wrestling championships are held at the end of this month, one of the surprising teams expected to contend for the title will be Mission High. That’s surprising not just because the Mission Bears have never been a wrestling powerhouse, but because the team is getting a major coaching assistance from Golden Gate Wrestling Club - an adults-only wrestling team formed in 1982 to compete in the Gay Games.
It’s an "only in San Francisco" partnership of city government, public school district and LGBT volunteer group forged out of budgetary necessity and mutual respect.
Prolonged remodeling work this summer on the wrestling room at Mission dragged into fall, leaving the team without a place to train. Rather than trying to piece together a season of training his teams in hallways, Mission Coach Jose Urista turned to Golden Gate.
"Who you date has nothing to do with the sport you play," Urista told Edge. "Wrestling is something that once you’ve experienced it first hand, it’s a bonding experience. It’s like a brotherhood."
GGWC had already been looking at creating a program to offer twice-monthly coaching clinics to all San Francisco high school wrestlers. When the wrestlers learned of Mission’s predicament, they decided to "adopt" the high school that had been coached by GGWC founder Don Jung when the club formed in 1981.
Now five times a week, the sounds of shuffling feet fill the upstairs room of Eureka Valley Recreation Center when GGWC’s Wrestling Alliance practices are held. Anywhere from 8 to 20 boys and girls trudge five blocks up 18th Street to attend each practice, supervised by Urista and 4 or 5 volunteer coaches from Golden Gate.
For GGWC coaches such as Ross Capdeville, 28, the program is a chance to give back to the community.
"Being gay in San Francisco no longer means that you’re marginalized, and I’m too young to have seen that, in the past, when it was," Capdeville told Edge. "If we have a wrestling club that caters only to gays and women adults, I see that as increasingly hard to sustain. I’m gay and I train at other clubs and other high schools: it’s not an issue. I want to see us move towards including the greatest amount of people. Just promote wrestling."
Wrestling in San Francisco is in need of promotion. Historically, USA Wrestling’s Bay Area Wrestling Association was composed primarily of high school coaches. Now there are no full-time high school coaches on the entire San Francisco Peninsula, and there are no youth programs anywhere in the city. Scholastic wrestlers in the city are at an obvious competitive disadvantage when they face wrestlers from the north, south and east bay areas who have full-time coaches and active youth programs.
Mayor Gavin Newsom put out repeated calls in 2006 and 2007 for members of the community to help local schools overcome their economic hardships. The city’s parks and recreation department explored imposing fees on groups using the recreation centers. That talk led GGWC, which operates on a shoestring budget and practices in Eureka Valley Rec Center for free, to create the Wrestling Alliance.
The acceptance of the Alliance outreach program represents an enormous cultural shift in San Francisco sports circles from Golden Gate’s early days. The club was formed at the suggestion of Gay Games founder Dr. Tom Waddell with the mandate to run a clean, recreational, competitive club. For years spies from other USA clubs would attend Golden Gate practices to try to dig up dirt. Eventually the spying stopped and the acceptance began.
"We went from being pariahs to priests of the sport," said GGWC President Gene Dermody, who coached high school wrestling in New Jersey before joining Golden Gate in 1982.
Until the Alliance program was created, Golden Gate rules always required that wrestlers be 18 years of age or older. "We had to protect ourselves," Dermody said, "because if I’m not here or somebody else is not here, we can’t have underage kids wandering in here and for whatever reason, somebody implying that something’s going on here that isn’t. And we’d been very, very strict about this. We imposed it on ourselves."
Members of Golden Gate said they have received multiple requests through the years from coaches, parents and students to begin a scholastic program. Although the international freestyle of wrestling that Golden Gate wrestles is different than the folkstyle used in American schools, it emphasizes core mechanics and sound fundamentals that can make even relatively inexperienced wrestlers competitive.
The wrestlers at Mission High are predominantly Hispanic and Asian living in the inner city. Urista, a security guard at Mission High, fought to get the part-time coaching job at Mission as a chance to help shape the students lives. He’s been coaching there for four years now.
In that time, Mission High has risen from ninth place to fifth while boasting a team GPA of 3.0. After two early losses, the freshman-heavy squad won its next two meets. Senior captain Terrence Li is setting a solid example for the squad, leading practices and winning the City Club scholarship, a $40,000 scholarship given to only one student in the city on the basis of scholarship and community service. Currently, he is being recruited by Ivy League colleges.
After one of its victories, Urista said, "their coach told me, ’Mission wrestlers are tough and technical.’ Nobody ever called us technical before."
Capdeville recalled the excitement one of the boys on the team expressed over being given direct access to GGWC’s wrestling knowledge and experience. "He’d been dreaming all his life to have someone like me to train with," Capdeville said.
GGWC plans to expand the program after the season to open training sessions for wrestlers from throughout the city. High schools have begun requesting information on how to enroll their wrestlers. Other clubs in Wrestlers WithOut Borders, the international organizations that represents LGBT wrestling with clubs in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego and Chicago, are looking at emulating Golden Gate’s example.
At the end of almost every Mission practice, Coach Urista thanks the coaches from Golden Gate and calls them a blessing from heaven. The wrestlers shake the coaches’ hands --then pull out the mops to clean the mats. Cleanliness is next to wrestlingness.
"Once you’ve sweated, and you’ve bled, and you have black eyes and bruises, and you’ve worked to the point of exhaustion and you keep going - it’s just something that all wrestlers share," Urista said. "And it’s got nothing to do with what you do in your private life."
