Strength in numbers: Kamiak girls wrestling takes next step

MUKILTEO — For Kamiak girls wrestling, the team’s first day of practice on Monday felt like a typical introduction to a season. Kids scrambled to submit the right participation forms. Coaches went over team guidelines. The team participated in ice-breaker activities.

But aside from the opening day formalities, things could not have been more different.

After seeing Lillian Burgess and Eden Cole win titles in their respective weight classes at last season’s District 1 4A Championships in February, coach John Knight-Baldwin said he hoped the team would grow from just eight wrestlers — not enough to fill out a lineup across all 14 weight classes — to 16-20 the following season.

Knight-Baldwin and the returning wrestlers took significant steps to recruit both incoming freshmen and current Kamiak students to join the program, which resulted in 25 girls taking the mat on Monday with nearly 20 more signed up on the roster. It’s a no-cut program, but Knight-Baldwin expects the roster to settle in the low-30s after the “growing pains” of the first days of practice.

Asked what would qualify as a successful season for the new-look team, Burgess believes that box has already been checked.

“Honestly, we’re already here,” Burgess said. “The biggest goal that I personally had as like an overall team goal was just at least doubling (in size). We for sure more than doubled our numbers, and I think that’s just the most successful thing for this season. Slowly, we can build onto that, but now we have enough girls on the team to be placing at tournaments.”

In just one offseason, Kamiak experienced rapid growth into unprecedented numbers, shattering the program’s pre-pandemic peak of 18 girls wrestlers. It didn’t come out of nowhere.

In addition to creating buzz with the success at districts, a group of wrestlers went to some of the nearby middle schools during the offseason to spread the word about both the girls and boys teams. The girls team set up a table at Kamiak’s back-to-school business days over the summer to inform incoming students, and Knight-Baldwin stopped by fall sports practices to invite athletes looking to get involved with a winter sport.

But perhaps the biggest selling point was the fact that the girls team is operating completely separate from the boys for the first time. Last year, the eight girls would share the practice space with over 100 boys, which was a hang-up for a lot of prospective girls wrestlers. Now, that’s no longer the case.

“One of the first things that a lot of girls will bring up is, ‘I don’t want to wrestle boys,’” Knight-Baldwin said. “We don’t wrestle boys, so it was a big selling point. There (were) a lot of conversations in the past where I was trying to recruit, it just came to an end. But now it’s, ‘No, we have a completely separate space.’ We ordered a brand new mat specifically for the girls. We’ve got a full schedule of not only tournaments — like we have in the past — but dual meets as well.”

Along with the new mat, the team is receiving more uniforms to accommodate the larger roster. Both were funded in part by the booster club and also by the Lady Knights Tournament that Knight-Baldwin has run for the past decade. The team’s funds are drained, but Knight-Baldwin called it a “good problem to have,” signaling the growth of the program.

Now that they have the numbers, the next step for Knight-Baldwin & Co. is keeping them around. Of the 25 wrestlers present on Monday, around 20 of them were new to the sport, so in this new chapter of Kamiak girls wrestling, the biggest focus will be hammering the basics and essentially putting a team together from scratch.

Helping out Knight-Baldwin is a new staff of five assistant coaches — David Oswald, Dan Munro, Evan McBroom, June Collins and Amor Campos — as well as the team captains, Burgess and Cole, who started things off by leading the warmups and guiding the newcomers through the different steps.

The returners want to foster a positive environment on and off the mat to keep morale high and encourage roster retention. Between helping each other improve in practice and scheduling team bonding events such as movie nights and a Secret Santa gift exchange, the Knights are striving to establish the foundation for a long-lasting culture.

“(We’re) really trying to project the idea that it’s worth it,” Cole said. “It will all be worth it. You will feel the happiest that you’ve ever felt after winning, and feeling just so healthy and mentally fit.”

Freshman Zoe Boyce-Ullom has prior wrestling experience under Knight-Baldwin, but ultimately decided to join the team after speaking to Burgess at one of the team’s wrestling camps in June, drawn in by the atmosphere created by the girls on the team.

“I met (Burgess) and she was like, ‘You should join wrestling,’ so that’s what made me wrestle,” Boyce-Ullom said.

As the program is putting pieces together for a stronger future, it is relying on its past: Both Collins and Campos are alumni of the girls’ program. A 2022 Kamiak grad, Collins said she was initially forced into the sport by her mother as a way to get more active, but she ended up falling in love with the sport and competed through all four years of high school.

Collins helped out the team during summer conditioning, and will continue to assist through the season as a way to give back to the sport that gave her so much.

“The coaches taught me a lot about wrestling and they pushed me through the matches and all that, and now I just feel like I want to come back because I love this sport,” Collins said. “I think I can make some new acquaintances. I like helping others, so I would like to (help) the wrestlers improve on their skills and teach them how to do it, and hopefully by the time they’re done here, they like the sport and hopefully maybe do it in college or something.”

For the current athletes, the presence of the alumni in the program can’t be overstated, especially as they try to establish a culture to fit a larger team.

“It’s really awesome seeing that Kamiak wrestling hasn’t been forgotten as people move on in their lives,” Cole said. “And that it still means something to them.”

While the coaches and captains are bringing the new athletes along with positive encouragement, that doesn’t mean they plan to take things easily.

With most of Monday’s practice dedicated to the orientation activities, the Knights had a limited window to get an actual workout in, but they tried to make the most of it by partnering up for spin drills and undergoing a conditioning gauntlet of sprints, bear crawls, sit-ups, push-ups, squats and mountain climbers.

As the girls went back-and-forth across the mat doing the final bear crawls, Knight-Baldwin yelled out a message to the girls beginning to tire.

“Thirty more seconds,” he said. “You can do anything for 30 seconds.”

For 30 more seconds, the Knights pushed through and finished out the rep.

Plenty of hard work went into simply getting the 25 girls through the door on Monday. Now, the real hard work begins.

“I think that there is still a little bit of a concern about what practices are going to be like with just girls,” Knight-Baldwin said. “I think there is a perception that it won’t be as intense. We’ll blow that perception away pretty quickly.”