Girls wrestling in Southern Arizona has evolved from Brooke Anderson being the only girl competing at Sahuaro High School when she was a senior in 2017 to working this weekend as one of the coaches at the All-Girls Wrestling Camp that included 85 participants at the Roman Bravo-Young Wrestling Club.
Anderson, an AIA wrestling referee in recent years, helped coach at Ironwood Ridge this season and 15 girls were on the Nighthawks’ roster by season’s end.
Fifteen.
“I wanted to become the coach I never had,” said Anderson of her coaching pursuit with wrestling.
Audrey Jimenez, the first four-time state champion girls wrestler in state history while at Sunnyside, was one of the feature speakers and trainers of the three-day event, the first of its kind in Southern Arizona. Pueblo’s nationally-ranked three-time state champ Elizabeth Valenzuela Smith assisted Jimenez.
Jimenez is one of the sport’s pioneers in Arizona — the first girl with four state titles — and is also one of best in her sport nationally with an NCAA title this season at Lehigh, two gold medals at the Pan American Championships and three silver medals at the U20 and U23 World Championships.
The personal achievements are appreciated by Jimenez, especially with the hours of work she puts in, but most rewarding to her is helping to grow women’s wrestling by maintaining a presence in the community.
“Roman did a really great job at getting so many girls here; I mean, he has a great setup as well, so many mats, he’s providing lunch and everything, and we’re just having a good time making it a comfortable environment for girls to just show up and learn and be vulnerable, because it’s a tough sport,” Jimenez said of the experience at the All-Girls Wrestling Camp that started Friday and concluded Sunday.
“It’s awkward sometimes, and it’s hard to learn, so we’re just all coming together with our different experiences. It’s been a lot of fun. The girls are having fun, and we’re having great clinicians come in, so it’s really great to see how much girls wrestling has grown and how much Roman is willing to help.”
Among the guest trainers/coaches who participated in the event was Bella Mir, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter on the rise who recently won an NCAA Division III wrestling championship this season with Naperville (Ill.) North Central College.
Erica Pastoriza, a 2021 World U17 champion from Phoenix who recently concluded her redshirt sophomore season at Iowa Central College, helped train the girls, as did Pastoriza’s coach at Iowa Central, April Ritts.
Arelys Valles, a Des Moines (Iowa) Grand View University assistant coach with international wrestling experience, worked with the girls Friday.
“RBY, him and I met like a while ago, I think I was like 16, so a long time ago, and we’ve kind of just been staying connected since he’s tried going into MMA,” said Mir, who hails from Las Vegas. “I also wrestled with him at a couple camps. He just texted me a month or so ago, asked if I want to help do a camp in Tucson, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah.'”
Bravo-Young’s success, including competing in the Paris Olympics two years ago, has enabled him to develop quite a network with wrestlers and coaches.
His career started to blossom while at Sunnyside from 2014 to 2018, winning four state titles and going unbeaten with a 182-0 record. He went on to win two national titles at Penn State.
Anderson’s wrestling career at Sahuaro coincided with most of Bravo-Young’s at Sunnyside.
Her coach with the Cougars was Chris Patterson, a local wrestling coach for the last 22 years. He is now leading Mica Mountain’s program after coaching Cienega following his time at Sahuaro.
She credits Patterson for giving her a chance with wrestling as the only girl who showed interest at Sahuaro at the time.
She clarified her comment of wanting to be the coach she never had in regards to Patterson.
“Patterson was amazing, don’t get me wrong, but I was also the first girl he ever coached,” she said. “I never had that female in the room with me. I had great male mentors, but I didn’t have someone who looked like me or talked like me.
“That is my main goal — to give these girls something that I didn’t have when I wrestled back in the day … give them a place in the room, let them know that they are welcome here. They have to earn their spot, just like the boys, but they are welcome. They have their place in the room. They have now shown that girls are wrestlers, too.”
The inability to compete in a high school state tournament in 2017, like girls have now, limited Anderson’s chance to compete in college. She turned to wrestling officiating, following in the footsteps of her father, Ralph Anderson.
The elder Anderson wrestled when younger and became an official when he was 18. He is 69 and still officiating.
Brooke’s officiating work helped land her position at Ironwood Ridge.
“This last season I was officiating, and the Ironwood Ridge girls team approached me, and they were like, “Hey, we’d love to get you out in the room to help us,'” she said. “They were like, “Oh my gosh, it’s so cool to see a female official out here.’ I was like, ‘I’m doing it for you guys. This is who I’m doing it for.’ So they pulled me, and their old head coach pulled me, and they wanted me to come start being in the room, helping them out a little bit more.
“I started going in the room and helping them out there, and towards the end of season, actually it was the night of the banquet, the boys head coach (Shawn Dubiskas) came to me and he was like, ‘Hey, l like what you’ve done with the girls throughout the end of season, and I want you to take over the program. So that ended up working out the way that it did, and now I’m taking over the program over there.”
When she started at Ironwood Ridge, the Nighthawks had only two wrestlers on the girls team. She immediately showed the ability to recruit.
“We ended with 15 wrestlers; a lot them, we literally pulled out of the hallway and we were like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna be a wrestler now,’ and they were like, ‘Okay,'” she said. “Not a single one of them has quit. Every single one of the girls that we recruited has stuck with it. They’ve brought in their sisters, their friends, so that’s kind of how we’re growing the program right now.”
Girls wrestling is at a blossoming stage, so stories like that carry a lot of meaning to established wrestlers such as Mir and Jimenez. They have persevered through the growing pains of the sport for women.
Jimenez wanted more of a challenge than what was presented by girls in the state as a senior in 2024. She successfully petitioned the AIA to compete in the boys state tournament. She earned the title, becoming the first female to win a state championship against boys.
“It would have been so great to be in an all-girls camp when I was younger because you’re getting so many girls together, and it’s just showing them what they can do — the possibilities that are here,” Jimenez said. “I mean, Bella Mir is going into fighting. We’ve all been able to go to college for this. We had a clinician that is a coach now (Valles), so it just shows the opportunities and the places you can go with wrestling and just coming together to do it.”
Mir said she had to wrestle against boys until she was a sophomore at Centennial High School in Las Vegas. She had only two female teammates during her junior and senior year in 2020 and 2021.
She added that during her youth wrestling days the amount of boys she could compete against at 140 pounds was even scarce.
“I just think it’s awesome that now girls have full teams in high school,” she said. “I love that they’re having more opportunities than I did. It’s just crazy. It’s not even like I’m old. I’m only 22.
“That just shows you how fast the sport’s growing, because literally, just a few years ago, when I was in high school, it was completely different when it comes to numbers. It’s just awesome how fast it’s growing.”
Mir’s father, Frank Mir, is a former MMA fighter who competed in the heavyweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) from 2001 to 2019.
Bella Mir will participate in another wrestling camp next week in New Jersey ahead of her Final X match against Kennedy Blades on June 19 at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. It is a best-of-three series that will determine the 68 kg representative for the USA Senior World Team. Mir secured her spot in Final X by winning the Senior Open division in Las Vegas, where she was awarded Outstanding Wrestler.
Jimenez is continuing to rehabilitate her shoulder that required surgery after she won her NCAA title with Lehigh in March. She will competitively wrestle again after heading back to Lehigh in September. She plans to compete in the U.S. Team trials that will precede the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
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ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He is a former Arizona Daily Star beat reporter for the Arizona basketball team, including when the Wildcats won the 1996-97 NCAA title. He has also written articles for CollegeAD.com, Bleacher Report, Lindy’s Sports, TucsonCitizen.com, The Arizona Republic, Sporting News and Baseball America, among many other publications. He has also authored the book “The Highest Form of Living”, which is available at Amazon. He became an educator in 2016 and is presently a special education teacher at Sunnyside High School in the Sunnyside Unified School District.
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