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KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – What the girls in the little-known Lake County Wrestling Club want is a league of their own.
And what the Lake County Wrestling Club overall wants is, well, not to be little-known.
Adam Garcia, a California Highway Patrol officer who is a chief spokesperson for it, describes the club as a youth development organization that functions the way youth leagues serve as feeders for high school football or Little League does in baseball.
It was started by Garcia and outgoing Rob Brown, a longtime wrestling coach and county supervisor, which explains why the club is based at Kelseyville High School. Brown wrestled for Kelseyville in the 103-pound weight division.
“We’re trying to build the club as are most of the high school wrestling coaches, who are pushing for acceptance,” Garcia says. “I don’t think we’ve been that relevant for a number of years.
“And we’re trying to work under the radar. Elvis Cook (high school) and Ronnie Campos (wrestling club) are also helping with the wrestling. Brown keeps everything going and I’m helping him Kelseyville.
“We have about 20-some kids who come in at different times. The youngest kid is 5 and they go all the way up to 18.”
Weights run as high as 250 pounds.
The club, a countywide endeavor, originated as the Middletown Mat Rats. But the move was made because of the distance from Middletown to Kelseyville.
There are three neighborhood clubs in all, one for each section of Lake County – i.e. Kelseyville, Upper Lake and Lower Lake – according to assistant Kelseyville coach, Julio Ambriz.
What they do is develop skill sets for Lake County wrestlers to enable them to compete against counties among the 58 in California for honors at the section, state – and hopefully national – level.
“I don’t think anybody from our (North Central) league ever won a state (title) here in Lake County. Kelseyville, to my knowledge, has never had a section champion,” said Garcia who during the 1990s wrestled for the Lower Lake Trojans and has been an assistant wrestling and football coach for Lower Lake High School.
“We’ve never had a state or section champion at Kelseyville. So that’s the goal,” he added.
“League champions ... we’ve had plenty of those. State qualifiers ... we’ve had plenty of those. We want some section champions and state medals,” he said.
Garcia makes no secret of the fact that both of his sons – Alex, 14, and Brandon, 12 – are totally focused on bringing the first national wrestling medals home to Lake County.
“I think maybe the potential’s there,” said Garcia. “Alex has been dedicated during the summer and been in the weight room. Getting kids to come here and then work out and commit to something is hard.”
Alex has a dual objective. He is also being groomed as the Kelseyville junior varsity football team quarterback.
At the same time, Lake County girl wrestlers have grown weary of not having an organized structure.
Brown says he has talked to the county’s girl wrestlers about setting up tournaments. Could Lake County girl wrestlers indeed form a league of their own?
“Yes,” said Brown, “they could do it."
Twin wrestlers Korbyn and Kylie Ambriz estimate there are 30 to 36 female wrestlers in Lake County high schools.
“It would be very important to have a league to get more girls to come out,” said Korbyn.
“I think it would be good to compete against Windsor and Santa Rosa,” said Kylie. “It could only help us get better. I think that all of the different teams like Sacramento could really help us out for our competition.”
But, said Kylie, “You have to have the mindset for it and the will to do it. You’d have to be a leader.”
Girls never really had their own league here, said Garcia. ”But we’ve had a lot of interest from them, plus there’s a middle school program, thanks to Rob Brown.
“That’s the one thing I’m really proud of,” said Garcia. “We put time into – I don’t know if you call it a vision or not – to make it possible, Brown twisted the arm, so to speak, of the County Office of Education and talked to the supervisors and got them to approve. It’s been amazingly successful.”
Girls, said Brown, have always wrestled.
“They’ve always had one or two wrestlers,” he said. But until women’s wrestling was allowed in the Olympics it was just kind of a novelty. “Now they are an integral part of our team. Critical athletes.”
Brown noted that last year there were seven girls on the Kelseyville team, including his daughter Juliette, an outstanding wrestler.
Garcia noted that California and New Jersey are the only two states with one individual state champion in every weight class.
“There is only one champion in each weight in California, whereas you go to Nevada, Arizona or Washington they’ll have a champion based on school size. So you have five or six state champions in each weight class. When we go to ‘state’ it’s us against everybody,” he said.
Girls middle school wrestling in Lake County started just two years ago.
“The turnout with the girls is getting more and more,” said Ambriz.
“The opportunity for (middle-school) girls is large and attainable,” said Garcia. “It’s very exciting to see them picking up the sport.”’
The wrestling club has a third goal – the hard cases to which Ambriz devotes himself.
The worst-case scenario involved what Ambriz estimated was a sixth grader.
“I told him if you don’t do something to straighten yourself out you’re probably going to end up in jail,” he said. “That kid came over to our wrestling program for two years. The first year he had a really hard time. Then he actually won some matches and won a medal. I took a picture of him with his medal and then framed it and gave it to his family. It was like Christmas morning.”
Email John Lindblom at
