Even a Pacific typhoon couldn’t keep Quinn Bauer from indulging her passion for wrestling.
The 10-year-old was back in southwestern Pennsylvania in March after her family, who live in Saipan in the western Pacific Ocean, was evacuated during a damaging storm. On Tuesday evening, she was among a large group of young girls attending opening night at the Liberty Wrestling Club, a new girls’ wrestling facility in Murrysville.
“My husband started a wrestling club back home in Saipan,” said Quinn’s mother, Kerri Bauer. “So she’s done some wrestling and when we were looking for things she could do while we were in town, I found the club on Google.”
Youth wrestling parents Tony Prosdocimo, Ben Fallon and Corinne Fallon started the club, located on Lillian Avenue in Murrysville, as a way to get the girls’ middle school wrestling team a little more space to work on their skills.
“We’re growing,” Prosdocimo said. “We had 31 girls sign up last year, and it’s only going to get bigger, so we wanted to see if we could find a space that we could all fit into. This space kind of fell into our laps, and we sort of thought, ‘There aren’t any girls wrestling clubs nearby. Let’s just start it.’”
The club is also partnering with Franklin Regional girls wrestling coach Hailey Huerta.
“We pretty much had just enough space at the middle school for the size of the team last year,” Huerta said. “And we’re growing.”
In January, the high school girls wrestling team won its first dual meet, 36-24, against Gateway, and six members of the team earned medals at the Connellsville Invitational earlier this year.
Prosdocimo said he wants Liberty Wrestling Club to continue bringing younger female wrestlers up through the ranks.
“I don’t mind that my daughters wrestle boys (at this age); that’s part of it,” he said. “But at the same time, we wanted to get them a space where they could just wrestle other girls. Especially at this age when a lot of them are new to it, it’s just a lot more comfortable working with other girls.”
And while many of the young wrestlers at opening night are part of the Franklin Regional Junior Olympic wrestling program, Prosdocimo said he hopes to bring in families from across the region.
“We want girls from all around,” he said. “If you want to be a great female wrestler, we want you to come to Liberty Wrestling Club. I think that’s our vision. I have a buddy with a wrestling club in Yough, but that’s a bit of a drive. We want girls from Kiski, Plum, Gateway, Norwin, Penn-Trafford, all these places where it’s only about a 20-minute drive. We want the sport to grow.”
Events like the March 12 open house are a good chance for girls who are on the fence to get a real feel for the sport in an environment that is perhaps less intimidating than a co-ed, school-led program.
“It’s such an intense sport, and from the outside looking in, it can be a little scary,” Prosdocimo said. “Some people think, ‘Oh my gosh, can I do that?’ But once they get here, they’re having fun and they see that they’re tougher than they thought, that hopefully gives them the confidence to come back.”
Huerta said she’s forever grateful to Liberty’s owners.
“I feel really fortunate that we now have this space,” she said. “When it comes to the high school and middle school teams we’re going to be running over the next few years, being in this bigger space will be great.”