EDMONDS — At the 2014 3A Region I wrestling tournament, Edmonds-Woodway teammates Sidat Kanyi and Ebrima Fatty, then sophomores, squared off in the consolation bracket at 106 pounds.
Teammates, longtime training partners and friends, Kanyi and Fatty were now opponents in a match with the fulfillment of an improbable dream at stake.
The winner would advance to the state tournament. The loser’s season would end.
Kanyi and Fatty took different routes to get to the center of the mat that day, but their journeys started in the same place.
The Gambia is the smallest country on the mainland of Africa and at 4,363 square miles, it’s roughly twice the size of Snohomish County, to which the families of Fatty and Kanyi immigrated in 2006 and 2011, respectively.
The Fatty and Kanyi families’ moves to Edmonds were part of a migration of Gambians to the greater Puget Sound area since the early 1990s, as people sought refuge from the political instability of their homeland.
The Gambia and its president, Yahya Jammeh, have come under scrutiny from the international community in recent years for their restrictive social policies. The Gambia finally banned the practice of female genital mutilation in November, and last May Jammeh, who has referred to homosexuality as “an abomination”, threatened to slit the throats of gay men in his country.
The diaspora has placed 3,500 native Gambians in Snohomish, King and Pierce Counties since 1990, according to Demba Baldeh, an Everett resident and former president of the Seattle Gambia Association, since renamed the Northwest Gambian Association.
“When I moved here from New York in 1995, there were not a lot of Gambians in the area. Maybe less than 50,” Baldeh said. “I moved here because one of my friends from high school in Gambia moved here. He had a friend that had already moved here, and they convinced me to come. It can be very rough in New York, and it can be cheaper here to work and go to school. You could move here, work two jobs and pay for college.”
Edmonds-Woodway assistant principal Geoff Bennett said there are 11 students of Gambian descent at Edmonds-Woodway High School in a student body of 1,680, and four of them are on the wrestling team — Fatty, Kanyi, Salihou Fatty (Ebrima’s younger brother) and Abdoulie Jatta.
Fatty moved to Edmonds with his family at the end of second grade and was first exposed to wrestling in elementary school, when he accompanied his friend Issac Jackson and Jackson’s father to Issac’s wrestling practice at USA Everett.
“I wasn’t really that into it at the time, but when (Edmonds-Woodway wrestling coach Brian) Alfi and his assistants came to my middle school to do a clinic, all the P.E. students had to participate at least one day,” said Fatty, whose younger brother Salihou is a sophomore on the wrestling team. “It seemed pretty fun, so I decided to come out for it.”
Kanyi arrived in Edmonds with his family in the summer before his eighth-grade year, and he knew immediately he wanted to participate in athletics.
“I went to the office to sign up for basketball, but I was too late,” Kanyi said. “The lady at the office told me that wrestling season would be in a few months, and I should try it.”
He agreed to give the new sport a try, but wasn’t quite prepared for what he saw at his first practice.
“I thought it was going to be like WWE,” Kanyi said. “I watched WWE in Gambia, and I always wanted to do WWE. My first wrestling match I went up to my coach and said, ‘When do I fight?’ He said ‘You don’t fight, you wrestle.’”
Fatty and Kanyi met as eighth-graders on Aaron Swett’s wrestling team at College Place Middle School and were frequent practice partners since they were both around the same size. They were natural friends, as they took Quran study classes together and their families worshipped at the same place.
As Edmonds-Woodway freshmen, Kanyi and Fatty were the third- and fourth-string junior-varsity wrestlers at 106 pounds, but continued to soak the sport up like sponges, wrestling in every tournament they could and spending extra time in the practice room — sometimes with coaches, sometimes alone.
Both wrestled year-round, competing in freestyle tournaments under Alfi’s direction in the summer as part of the Wrestling Rhinos club.
“That was when we both really started making big gains and went from catching up to the kids that used to beat us to eventually beating them,” Fatty said. “We just took every opportunity we had to wrestle.”
Kanyi added that those extra sessions weren’t always fun for him and Fatty, but each improved by going head-to-head so many times.
“(Ebrima) helped me become a better wrestler because whenever I wrestled him, he never stopped,” Kanyi said. “He always kept competing with me.”
They also developed their own distinct styles on the mat, and have benefited greatly from Alfi’s program at Edmonds-Woodway, which emphasizes exposure to a variety of different approaches and allows a wrestler to choose the one that best suits him or her.
“Philosophically, we want to expose our kids to as many different people as possible,” Alfi said. “There’s not just one thing or one system that has molded them, and it’s not just our way. We bring in a lot of different clinicians, and we think it’s been an advantage. Our guys are taking pieces from all over from different voices and are implementing them to be the best wrestlers they can.”
Kanyi and Fatty are unorthodox from the start.
In the upcoming postseason, Fatty will wrestle at 113 pounds and Kanyi at 120, but they are both around 6 feet tall, a rarity among wrestlers at those weights.
“They’re not the most traditional wrestlers. If you’re going to wrestle Sidat, you can’t just grab the 6-foot-1, 120-pound guy in your (practice) room and see what it’s going to be like,” Alfi said.
Conventional wrestling wisdom also says wrestlers such as Fatty and Kanyi, with long arms and legs, are more prone to leg attacks from opponents.
Alfi said the pair has learned to turn that perceived weakness into a strength.
“They’ve learned to protect their legs, and their legs can be a long way away from the other guy too,” he said. “It was a weakness, but it’s very hard to get on their legs now. And they’re tough to get away from because they have such a long reach.”
On the mat, Fatty is different from Kanyi. Fatty is more technical and calculating, and Kanyi relies more on his raw athleticism, thriving in scramble situations.
“I’m funky,” Kanyi said of his wrestling style. “I can get out of positions that people think are too dangerous. I can do some funky things.”
“He just finds ways to win,” Fatty added.
Kanyi found a way at the regional tournament that day in 2014, beating his teammate, training partner and friend 5-2 to reach the state tournament, just 21/2 years after moving to Edmonds from The Gambia and discovering that amateur wrestling is not like the WWE.
Fatty joined Kanyi at the state tournament in their 2015 junior seasons, with Fatty placing seventh at 106 pounds and Kanyi taking fourth at 113 to join three other 2016 Warriors who placed at Mat Classic.
In the most recent 3A team rankings by WashingtonWrestlingReport.com, Edmonds-Woodway is fifth in the state, and likely climbing after beating No. 4 Arlington at home on Friday.
The Warriors are certainly among the contenders to win a team title at February’s state tournament.
Fatty, ranked fourth in the state at 113 pounds and Kanyi, ranked third at 120, will play integral roles in whatever the Warriors achieve during the postseason.
They are both prime examples of how much a wrestler can grow in a short amount of time through consistent hard work and a desire to improve.
Both have goals of winning a state championship to cap their prep careers, and both would like to pursue careers in law enforcement and criminal justice.
“The top guys in the state are all so close, and it’s really all about whose day it is and who’s really clicking going into the state tournament,” Fatty said. “A title is in reach.”
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