PALM COAST — Makayla Wilder may only be a junior at Matanzas High School, but she speaks with the confidence and bravado of an adult, often wearing a smile that stretches from ear to ear.
That smile wasn't always easy to find. Just a few years ago, it was rarely seen.
"I was bullied in middle school," Wilder said. "I had three girls telling me they were going to meet me in the bathroom and beat me up. After that, my parents told me they were going to teach me how to defend myself."
Wilder's dad, Richard, wasted little time, and enrolled her into mixed martial arts halfway though her eighth grade year.
"You know, it was probably just kids being kids," he said. "But when it becomes a six-on-one type of thing, it's time to learn how to defend yourself. We talked about it and she decided she wanted to try it out. She loved it."
After about six months, Wilder's MMA coach — a former wrestler — decided to teach her a couple moves. Then, two months into her freshman year at Matanzas, Wilder approached head wrestling coach John White about joining the team. At the time, he had never had a girl wrestler on any of his teams.
"There were no girls in wrestling when I was in high school and college," said White, who's been a wrestling coach in Flagler county for 17 years and wrestled at Gardner-Webb University, in North Carolina. "Back in the '80s, girls wrestling just didn't exist. It didn't happen. I can't even remember ever seeing a girl wrestle. Now, it's one of the fastest growing sports in college."
That growth has also trickled down to the high school level, especially in Central Florida. Wilder was the first, and only, female to wrestle at Matanzas. Now, three years later, there are five female wrestlers at Matanzas, and at least two dozen around the area.
Over at University, the Titans have a staggering 17 female wrestlers on the team, including junior Eny Zuniga, who recently gave up cheerleading to be a full-time wrestler. A couple exits south of Matanzas at Flagler Palm Coast, freshman Bri Sing joined the Bulldogs wrestling squad last month after she didn't make the basketball team. Just outside of the area at Orlando's Dr. Phillips High School, the Panthers feature 25 girls on this year's roster.
Along with Wilder at Matanzas, teammates Angelina Bermudez, Morgan Morrison, Jordin Monge and Riley White — Coach White's freshman daughter — also wrestle. Bermudez, now in her second year, joined because she "liked violent sports."
"Girls sports are boring," she said with a laugh. "It's a lot of fun. I didn't do football, so I figured wrestling was the next best thing."
Those seven are just a small sample of female wrestlers in the area, and an even smaller sample of female wrestlers around the state. Last year, there were 358 female wrestlers on high school teams in Florida, up from 97 in 2010.
"We've definitely seen a growth," said J.A. Colasanti, the FHSAA's membership specialist. "We keep track of it and we're definitely noticing it."
While the idea of female wrestling may be new to some, Sing doesn't view competing in a traditionally male-dominated sport as anything unusual.
"I didn't make the basketball team, and my family is pretty athletic, so I didn't want to go an entire season without doing a sport," she said. "I did some preseason weightlifting, so I figured I'd give wrestling a shot. It's been really good so far."
University head coach Matt Weaver has coached wrestling for 25 years and said the 17 girls on this year's roster are the most he's ever fielded.
"The last five or six years I've definitely seen a steady climb," he added. "I'm not sure why. Hopefully it's because, as society changes, it's becoming more acceptable. Ten years ago, you'd talk to people about girls wrestling and they'd cringe. Times are changing and it's more acceptable now. It's no longer the 1950s."
Despite the growth, the FHSAA still does not recognize female wrestling as a sanctioned sport. Instead, girls are expected to compete on the boys' teams throughout the year and wrestle primarily boys. However, if they don't advance to the FHSAA state tournament, they enter the Girls State Wrestling Championships in February — a non-FHSAA event hosted by the winning school from the previous year.
This season the nonsanctioned girls state tournament will take place at Dr. Phillips High School. Last year, Wilder took home a fourth-place finish in the 113-pound class, while Bermudez finished fifth in the 138 division.
"Being at a girls meet, you realize there are a lot of other girls just like you," Bermudez said. "(Guys) definitely have the testosterone and they're stronger than me. Some of them are, at least. It's just hard to get an advantage on them when they already have the advantage of strength."
Zuniga, who was a cheerleader for the past 10 years, said she joined the wrestling team her freshman season to simply "prove statistics wrong."
"I wanted to prove that girls could be wrestlers, too," said the 106-pound junior, who is 10-1 this season. "I wrestle girls and guys, and it's the same. A win is a win and a loss is a loss, it doesn't matter who it comes against. The technique is different — girls are more heavy-handed, while guys take some more shots — but it's the same. There's no gender on the mat."
Matanzas senior Stone White said he's wrestled girls in the past and hasn't given it a second thought.
"Oh yeah, I've wrestled a couple (of girls)," he said. "Obviously the challenge is just size and muscle mass. Guys naturally have more muscle, so it can be tough to get over that. I think it's pretty cool, though. When I started here we had no girls on the team. Now we have five. I think part of the challenge is just breaking into the sport, because there's just not as many girls doing it, so it's tough to get that knowledge. They just have to keep building it up."
Over the past two decades, they have.
Nationally, female participation in high school wrestling has grown every year since the turn of the century, up from 2,474 in 2000, to 14,587 last year, according to the National Federation For State High School Associations. The NFHS also said that a handful of states have started sanctioning female wrestling teams, with Texas, California, Tennessee and Hawaii being the most robust.
The NCAA also doesn't recognize women's wrestling as a sport, but that could soon change. Right now, 30 schools participate in the Women's Collegiate Wrestling Association (WCWA), which is the governing body for women's college wrestling and has held national championships since 2004. As of last fall, the WCWA said participation had grown enough to the point where they could start pursing "emerging sports" status for women’s wrestling at the NCAA level.
University assistant coach Hector Blanco, who wrestled at the school until 2013, said increased exposure, specifically in the recent Olympic Games, has played a major role in the recent boom. At the 2016 summer games in Rio, Helen Maroulis became the first-ever gold medalist for the U.S. in women's wrestling, which were added to the Olympic program in 2004.
"I think a lot of these girls, they see that and they're like, if Helen (Maroulis) can do it, we can do it," Blanco said. "I'll wrestle some of the girls in practice and I'm like, 'Wow.' If Helen were to come into the UHS practice room, she'd whoop my butt. I think a lot of it's also just changing of the times. I think in the past it was maybe taboo for girls to wrestle. Parents are more open nowadays."
Blanco and the rest of the area saw a sign of the changing times last month when Matanzas hosted its first all-girls wrestling meet — the Lady Pirate Classic. Zuniga came in second in the 106-pound division, while Wilder and Sing both placed third in their respective classes.
According to White, there were more than 20 teams and 150 girls in attendance.
"It's definitely growing," Wilder said. "I hope it becomes a sanctioned sport one day, though, because I feel like if it did, a lot more girls would come out and wrestle, and I feel like they would be really great at it."
That possibility hasn't yet been brought to any FHSAA wrestling advisory committee, according to wrestling administrator Robbie Lindeman. For now, Wilder says that competing primarily against guys hasn't been all that bad.
"It can be a challenge because they tend to be stronger, so you sort of have to play a game with them," she said. "My first time beating a guy was my freshman year, my very first match ever. I pinned him in a minute and forty-five seconds. When I got up I just started crying, and I looked at my dad and it was just amazing."
It's been two years since that moment, but Richard Wilder remembers it like it was yesterday.
"She was a girl coming into a man's sport, so it was a fight," he said. "She had to earn that respect, and she's done a great job of it. Really, they all have."