The Findlay girls wrestling team is only in their second year of being an official team of just girls at the Findlay high school. There are a couple reasons that they have only been a team for 2 years…and their first reason was because they didn’t have enough girls to make a complete team.
Their second reason is because at the time (2021) most schools did not have enough “just girl” teams and couldn’t schedule girls tournaments. Their head coach, Ben Kirian who is also a social studies teacher at Findlay highschool, has made this comment in a recent interview on why the team has only been a team for 2 years,
“The first year the OHSAA hosted a tournament was last season. It was not a sanctioned separate sport until last season.We added the team two years ago due to having a number of girls that would be on the boys team and the emergence of girls only tournaments and teams.”
The coaches were a lot easier on the girls because the team was very brand new to them and he wanted to keep the team as much of a team as they could. Here is another comment from their head coach
”I would say during the first year, we were very easy on them compared to the boys as it was so new to them and we needed to make sure we kept a team intact. Last season, we ramped it up more intensely and this year we plan to coach them virtually the same.“
The coaches tried to schedule as many tournaments as they could considering not many schools at this time had girls wrestling teams.”The first year they wrestled in two boys tournaments as there were not that many girls tournaments yet. “
These girls have done an amazing job at wrestling and Findlay highschool can’t wait to see where the world takes them…
”A number of the girls (Laney Oliver, Emmy Caton, Olivia Gill, Rylee Touhalisky, Julia Bollenbacher) wrestle year round now and compete on the national level. These girls want to wrestle in college so the practice expectations are able to climb with their level of experience, work ethic and goals” coach Kirian said.
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