Scott Swanson
Marissa Kurtz was about to start warming up for her state wrestling finals match Saturday evening, Feb. 23, when she heard the announcer tell the crowd that the Tyrone Woodley Woods Scholarship awards presentation was about to begin.
Kurtz, a senior, had been encouraged to apply for the award while she was wrestling at the Oregon Classic tournament earlier in the season. The scholarship and award trophy, which is the only one awarded during the state wrestling championships, are named after a one-time Oregon City wrestler and state place-winner who became a Navy Seal and then, as a private security contractor, was killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
“It’s pretty prestigious,” said Sweet Home Coach Steve Thorpe.
This year was the first time the $1,000 scholarship has been awarded to a female wrestler. It is presented to the high school wrestler(s) judged “most outstanding” on the basis of academic excellence, citizenship and wrestling achievements.
Kurtz paused in the doorway leading from the Veterans Memorial Coliseum to the warm-up room with her teammate, junior Lexi Schilling, to catch what the announcer was saying.
“I heard them say, ‘This girl has a so-and-so GPA and she won her freshman and junior year,'” said Kurtz, who was aiming for the third state title of her high school career. “Lexi was next to me in the doorway and I heard them read a line from my essay, and I said, ‘Lexi, that’s me!’ I was freaking out.”
Despite that distraction, Kurtz was able to concentrate enough to beat Hillsboro freshman Emma Blackwell 4-1 in the 110-pound championship final.
“This has been a good year for Marissa,” said Coach Steve Thorpe, who said Kurtz has taken advantage of community support, as well as her own talent and work ethic, to become “a next-level wrestler,” in addition to playing on the state’s fifth-place volleyball team and as a varsity team member in softball.
He said Kurtz has done “the extra things” – off-season practice and Greco and freestyle tournaments, which have helped her develop her skills.
“She’s benefited from having other women in the room and she’s been a leader.”
In her essay for the award, Kurtz said, she told how wrestling “has brought a lot of important people into my life. It’s made me a harder worker. It’s taught me lot of life lessons. It’s an inspiration to do better at everything I can do.”
If she had not participated in the sport, she said, “I definitely don’t think it would be the same at all. A lot of people who support me in other sports came from wrestling. Wrestling kind of sculpted the way I work in other sports too.”
In addition to coaches, she credits her mother, Lisa Kurtz, and friend Fritz Yunke for helping her in the sport and negotiating life.
Kurtz, who says she plans to go on to wrestle in college, has been one of the ground-breakers as girls wrestling has hit the mainstream in Oregon. Sweet Home has had other female wrestlers but the competition was much more limited in the early days of the sport.
“We’ve had a couple of other girls who have been part of our high school team,” Thorpe said. Both Cindy Gourley and Mandy Binks were team members but “we never had more than one. 2016 was when we had a team – two of them.”
That was the year Gracie Olson joined Kurtz, who was a freshman. The next year there were four, as Schilling and Katen Edwards joined in. This year the Huskies had eight girls.
“That’s when it became women wrestling women,” Thorpe said of the 2016 team. “From there, we’ve grown, not just in numbers but in quality.”
He said the expectations for girls are the same as the Husky boys.
“We practice together, we train together, we travel together. It’s Sweet Home wrestling. It’s a men’s wrestling team and a women’s wrestling team, but it’s all still Sweet Home wrestling.”
Kurtz said she got her start in wrestling during household face-offs with her brother Justin, who graduated last year as a state place-winner for Sweet Home.
“I always wrestled with him in the living room and one time I gave him a bloody lip. And I thought, ‘This is fun.'”
She started wrestling competitively as a sixth-grader for the Sweet Home Junior High team, mostly against boys in those days.
“At first it wasn’t weird for me because it was like wrestling with my brother. But as I got into high school, the guys made a bigger deal about it. I never really thought of it like that.
“I’ve always enjoyed wrestling the guys. It wasn’t as much pressure because, if I got beat, it was by a boy. So what.”
Thorpe said it was helpful for her to have Olson as a training partner when she reached high school, followed by Schilling and others.
Kurtz said she was happy to see girls step up and prove themselves.
“Gracie was a very hard worker,” Kurtz said. “I enjoyed her. Every year we’ve had more and more girls and I’d just think, ‘I hope these girls have it in them, because it’s tough. You have to have a certain kind of mindset to do it.”
Like other sports in which both males and females compete, women’s wrestling tends to emphasize technique over brawn, partly because the contestants tend to be more flexible, physically.
“When I was wrestling guys, it was more like they out-muscled me. With girls, you can tell they really focus on their technique and you have to do things a certain way because they’re so bendy.”
The fact that the sport is taking off has created a lot more competition now, compared to my freshman year,” Kurtz said.
She noted that at the Hood River tournament, at which the Sweet Home girls team finished first over 26 other teams, there were “170-something girls, more girls than there were boys.” At the southern regional tournament the next week, which Sweet Home also won, there were close to 300 wrestlers, she said. Last year, at the single qualifying tournament for state that included wrestlers from all over Oregon, there were about 400.
“The top four qualified last year (for state),” Kurtz said. “Only the top two qualified this year. It’s tough to get to state.”
“I don’t want to say “easy,” but it was definitely way easier than it was these past few years. Because girls have started younger, the freshmen, they’re getting tougher.”
Brad Garrett, OSAA assistant executive director, said that this year, the sport’s inaugural season under OSAA sanctioning, a total of 618 female wrestlers started this season in the organization’s 291 member schools.
Kurtz and fellow senior Hayden McDonald are slated to compete at the Oregon-California senior duals this weekend in Redding, Calif. Kurtz competed last year as a junior because Oregon didn’t have enough girls for a full team, Thorpe said.
He said Kurtz demonstrates character, “first and foremost.”
“She’s a good person. She’s a good student and a hard worker. That’s why she succeeds in the three sports she does and in the classroom. She has a great work ethic. You mix that with strength and talent and you have pretty good wrestler.”
His predecessor, Norm Davis, was known for saying, “Great athletes are a dime a dozen. Great athletes who are great people, now you have something,” Thorpe said. “I think Marissa fits that very, very well.”