Apple Valley personifies girls wrestling boom

Sports has grown to more than 1,000 competitors statewide

Cassy Gonzales was a state girls wrestling champion at Shakopee High School last year.

She also was restless.

She loved the sport and said the training she got at Shakopee was first-rate. But the wrestling room was almost exclusively male and she wrestled the majority of her regular-season matches against junior varsity boys. Gonzales sought a school with more girls on the wrestling team – more people who shared her dream and could relate to what she’s going through.

Gonzales found that at Apple Valley, where the sophomore currently is undefeated and ranked second in the state at 136 pounds.

At Shakopee, “it was me and one other girl,” she said. “I wanted to go someplace where there were more opportunities for girls. Bemidji was on the table, and so was (St. Michael-Albertville). But I was friends with some of the girls on this team, and I noticed the bond they had was great. And the coaches are amazing.

“I just knew there was something about this team and I could tell I wanted to be here.”

Girls wrestling is a booming sport, not just in Minnesota but nationwide. There were a few hundred girls wrestling in Minnesota high schools in 2021-22, the first year the Minnesota State High School League sanctioned the sport. It’s now more than 1,000, according to the MSHSL.

Apple Valley has 25 state boys team championships and 95 individual champions. It has produced NCAA champions and an Olympic gold medalist. When girls wrestling launched, the school decided it wanted to be one of the pioneers.

The Eagles have about 20 girls wrestling, making them one of the state’s largest teams (St. Michael-Albertville, with about 50 girls, is probably the largest). They’re ranked first in Minnesota by TheGuillotine.com and have eight individuals ranked in the top 10 in their weight classes. Apple Valley is 18th in the FloWrestling national high school girls rankings.

Team rankings are largely mythical for now, as the MSHSL does not yet have team competition for girls wrestling. But girls individual brackets will be part of the boys state tournament Feb. 29-March 2 at Xcel Energy Center.

All South Suburban Conference high schools are embracing girls wrestling. Eastview is eighth in the state team rankings, and wrestlers from Eastview and Rosemount show up in the individual rankings.

When girls wrestling was sanctioned, Apple Valley decided it wanted to be successful at it – and quickly, said Josh Barlage, head coach of the Eagles’ boys and girls teams.

“As soon as we found out it was going to be sanctioned by the state high school league, we kind of hit the ground running and we were going through our hallways trying to get girls to be a part of it,” Barlage said. “In remembering conversations with other coaches that first year, I’m not sure they saw what we saw, but I think they’ve changed their thoughts on that.

“I remember in the early days there were a lot of programs that said, ‘We don’t want anything to do with girls wrestling. We’re just going to focus on boys.’ That has changed.”

Grace Alagbo, a senior, is a multi-sport athlete, which included playing outside linebacker in football. Wrestling didn’t enter the picture until her sophomore year, when the MSHSL first sanctioned the sport. One of the Eagles’ boys wrestling captains encouraged Alagbo to try it. He’d show her some of the basic techniques, and if it wasn’t for Alagbo, she could walk away.

She stayed. Alagbo became Apple Valley’s first state girls wrestling champion in 2022, took second in the 2023 tourney and is ranked first in the state at 170 pounds this year. What’s more, she encouraged other Apple Valley student-athletes to join.

“I just tell people my story,” Alagbo said. “Being our school’s first state champion gave me the courage to go out and recruit people. People say, ‘No, I don’t want to. I’m not going to be good,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, look at me. I didn’t have any experience and I won state my first year, so anything’s possible.’ So definitely, I use that to push girls into the sport a little bit.”

After the initial success, Alagbo dove headlong into wrestling. “I started wrestling off-season with a couple of club teams,” she said. “Also, I’m a film junkie, so I watched as much wrestling as possible. I just go out there and try to copy what I see. We have great coaches in our room that help me get better, and so I definitely saw a huge improvement in my skill level.”

Eagles senior Gloriann (“Glo”) Vigniavo said she likes that wrestling exists as an option for girls who are athletic but haven’t found their sports niche.

“I think there are a lot of great female athletes in our school,” said Vigniavo, who finished third at 185 pounds in the 2023 state tournament and is ranked second at 190 this season. “But maybe some of them aren’t doing as well as they want to be in their sport. Wrestling is a good individual sport, but here you also get that bond from having a close-knit group of teammates. They transfer over to wrestling because it helps improve your mental toughness and physical toughness.”

Vigniavo played basketball but was looking for a change. She knew Alagbo, one of her friends, was going to try wrestling. She also watched the boys wrestlers in their summer workouts and thought, “that’s the kind of mindset I want to have.”

So Vigniavo tried wrestling – and initially thought she made a mistake. “My first year I wanted to quit after every single practice,” she said. “I have a bit of a martial arts background, but that’s not remotely similar to wrestling. I’m just impressed I made it this far. I never expected to qualify for state. This was completely new and foreign to me.”

Barlage said it was important to the school if it was going to have a girls wrestling team, it needed to have opportunities to compete against girls. All practice and few competitive opportunities wasn’t going to cut it. The sport’s growth has made it easier for the Eagles to find matches. Gonzales said last year at Shakopee she wrestled only a couple of matches against girls before the section tournament; this season she’s 23-0, all against girls.

In early January, the Eagles had an opportunity to wrestle at the Clash Duals, perhaps the nation’s premier high school dual-meet tournament. This was the second year the Clash had a girls bracket. Apple Valley reached the championship bracket and defeated Liberty High School of Peoria, Arizona, which was ranked fifth nationally by FloWrestling. The Eagles lost to Raccoon River-Northwest, a co-op team from Iowa, and eventually finished second in the tournament.

Other than the wrestlers who competed at the state tournament, few Eagles had an opportunity to compete in a big venue in front of a lot of people. They had a blast.

“It was one of the best things ever,” Alagbo said. “I never thought we’d have that experience to be like the boys where it’s a dual meet with parents and everything. But we got that experience and made it to the finals. It was incredible to see how far women’s wrestling has come because in my sophomore year we never would have had that opportunity.”

A dual-meet team championship might be the next frontier in girls wrestling, and Barlage said Apple Valley will try to help make it happen.

“We’re able to participate in larger team events now, and that’s just a whole different experience,” Barlage said. “We wrestled the No. 5 team in the country and the excitement the girls had was fun to see. After Year 1 and Year 2 I asked the girls what their favorite things were about the season, and they all said they really enjoyed the couple of duals we were able to be part of. I think that’s the direction girls wrestling is going, and we hope to be at the forefront of it.”