Medomak Valley High School senior Rayanne Leach jumped at the chance to compete at the Cadet/Junior National Freestyle Wrestling Championships in Fargo, N.D. The 16-year-old flew with her Maine Trappers team to wrestle in the tournament held at the Fargodome on July 17-23.
The trip was her first without her parents Holly and Jed Harris and her second time on a plane.
There were over 1,000 wrestlers at the national tournament.
“The California team was huge, and New York had 37 girls. California has a just girls team in high school,” Leach said.
There were only three girls on the Maine Trapper team, including Leach, Hillary Merrifield from Camden Hills, and Sophie Carson. They joined girls from Washington, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to form a team for the dual competition.
Leach was impressed with the size of the Fargodome which was big enough for 23 wrestling mats. The concessions were equally impressive with a large food court housing different restaurants.
Leach received two singlets, a jacket, shorts and a back pack as part of her registration fees. She said the singlets had a built in bra in them. “I wish our (Medomak Valley) singlets were like these,” she said.
With 23 matches going on at once, it was loud and wrestlers had to pay attention to keep up with their next match. All the matches were streamed on line.
“That was cool,” Leach said.
A tornado warning siren went off during the tournament which proved to be a false alarm, but added to the excitement to the event.
Leach’s first match was at 9 p.m., and then it was up early as dual competition started the next day. Although Leach said she did not do well at the girls tournament, she did wrestle well when it came time for the dual tournaments.
While there, 100 wrestlers at a time learned new moves in a practice room called the sweat box, which Leach called the hottest place she ever practiced.
The rules of freestyle wrestling are different from the folk style used by Maine high schools. Freestyle allows locking of hands. “It is going to be a hard habit to break,” Leach said.
The point system is different with a wrestler picking up five points for throwing an opponent. “You do a back bend while throwing them over backwards,” Leach said.
Slamming an opponent on the mat will get you five points, and pushing an opponent out of bounds is one point. Rolling an opponent onto their shoulder is two points. If an opponent is rolled more than once, the points keep adding up. A wrestler collects four points if they take down their opponent straight to their back.
“You can tech fall easy,” Leach’s sister Emily Harris said of the 10 points needed for a tech fall win. A tech fall does not stop the match however, “In a tech fall they will still let you pin them,” Leach said.
Another difference is in strategy. In folk style, wrestlers on the bottom want to build up their base to escape or do a reversal, but in freestyle the person on bottom wants to flatten out on their stomach.
“It is really hard to switch back from freestyle,” Leach said of making the transition to the high school season and folk style wrestling, which Leach said is much safer and has a less chance of getting injured.
Leach has been wrestling for three quarters of her life, having started in the peewee program at age four. The 2015 Maine State Girls championship was the first tournament in her 12 years of wrestling that she had competed in an all girls tournament.
Leach said she likes wrestling against girls better because the “boys are wicked strong. I’ve been wrestling against boys for so long it doesn’t matter.”
“I think I want it more. I want to win more,” Leach said of what she took away from the Fargo experience.
Her goal for the 2015-16 high school season is to qualify for the state tournament. “I know I can make it to states,” she said. “I’ve made it twice before. Once I was .1 (of a pound) over.”
Leach said she has already started her no carb diet “to lose weight for November.” Leach said managing her weight is “kind of hard. It has only been a problem a couple of times. Some mornings you wake up and your mouth is so dry.”
The hardest food for her to give up while training is ice cream, Leach said. Other favorites include fried chicken, mashed potato and pizza. “And barbecue sauce,” she said. “I put barbecue sauce on everything. The hardest thing is around Thanksgiving. I can have a mini Thanksgiving after a meet. It depends on how close I am (to making weight) if I can have a little piece of pie. My grandmother makes the best banana cream pie.”
Her freshman year Leach wrestled at 106, bumped up to 113 her sophomore year and 120 her junior year. Her goal is to wrestle at 113 again this season.
Leach is running cross country again this fall, and working out with the Maine Trapper wrestling team. “Sometimes I’m not home until 10 p.m.,” Leach said of her wrestling workouts. She practices twice a week with the Maine Trappers.
Leach’s sister Emily Harris, a seventh grader at Medomak Middle School, is following in her footsteps, in joining their father and MVHS coach Jed Harris’ in their love for the sport of wrestling.