When Britney Orellana moved to Flower Mound with her family in the fall, she quickly discovered something missing from her new high school: girls wrestling.
The sophomore picked up the sport from her older brothers and fell in love with it when she joined the team at Chisholm Trail. But the sport's popularity hadn't quite reached Flower Mound yet.
"In the past we tried it before and couldn't get enough work out partners to put together a team,” said boys team coach Steve Davis.
The University Interscholastic League requires that girls only compete against other girls in the sport, so Orellana would need to find other girls to practice with if she wanted to compete under the school’s name.
Davis told Orellana and her father that he would help them out if they were willing to put a team together.
So Britney got to work, but she quickly realized putting a team together would be more difficult than she thought.
"Of course there weren't too many girls in Flower Mound that wanted to wrestle because they thought it was a guy's sport," she said.
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She kept working to convince her classmates that wrestling wasn't just for guys and to the coaching staff’s surprise, Orellana found six others willing to give the sport a shot.
As luck would have it, a student teacher from Texas State, Tiffany Mangini, recently started teaching at Flower Mound, and she also wrestled.
"[I] Wrestled at Southlake High School all four years,” Mangini said.
So she agreed to coach the girls, and the Lady Jaguars Wrestling team was born.
The girls are now competing in the UIL and are quickly bonding as a team.
"We push each other as much as we can. Like, we’re together no matter what," Orellana said.
Their enthusiasm seems to be spreading, too. Already, the girls say a dozen or so other potential teammates have shown interest in joining next year.
