GHS wrestler Vanessa Gutierrez is putting those old gender
biases in a headlock
When Gilroy High’s Vanessa Gutierrez wrestles her male counterparts, it always seems to play out the same way.
“Before the match starts out,” the senior said, “they’ll be over there laughing at me, and saying ‘This is going to be so easy.'”
And then?
“Then,” JV head coach Marty Serrano said, “she just goes out and beats most of them.”
Gilroy, meet your latest All-American wrestler.
In her ever-growing sport, the 189-pound Gutierrez is now ranked No. 6 in the country by the United States Girls Wrestling Association. Just this past weekend in Vallejo, she won her second straight girls’ state title with a win over Redwood City’s Kristen Esterheld.
And come April, she will be among 14 female wrestlers taking part in the USA Dream Team Classic Dual Meet in Arlington, Texas.
She was even included in the latest edition of Wrestling USA magazine.
Back in seventh grade – when Gutierrez went out for the team at Brownell Academy – all of this success would have been hard to imagine. Heck, just sticking with the sport at all would’ve been hard to imagine.
“I didn’t think it would be as big as it’s become,” said Gutierrez’s mother, Sandy. “I figured she’d go and do it for awhile, get bored and find out it wasn’t for her.”
But that moment never came.
While all the other girls at Brownell gave up on the sport before high school, Gutierrez stuck it out.
“She just loves wrestling,” said her father, Gabriel. “She loves the sport.”
Much of that love comes from Gabriel himself. As someone who wrestled with the Gilroy Hawks in the early 1970s, Gutierrez passed along his passion for the sport.
Vanessa grew up wrestling with her three cousins across the street. Around the house, she would wrestle with her father and younger brother. So it simply came naturally – it ran in the family.
That doesn’t mean it always came easy, though.
At first, her teammates on the junior varsity squad weren’t exactly receptive of the idea of a girl in the group.
“The guys on the team were just not used to it,” Gutierrez said. “They didn’t like it much.”
Her first couple years at Gilroy High didn’t make for a great experience.
“A lot of the time she was disappointed because she felt like she was left out,” Sandy Gutierrez said. “I think mostly the other kids thought she was just in it for fun … so that kind of made it hard for her.
“I think it was really more me being sad for my daughter. I would’ve pulled her out, but she really pushed on because she really wanted to wrestle. She’s a pretty tough girl.”
Gutierrez persevered and eventually gained the respect of her teammates.
“She’s a part of the team like anyone else,” freshman Travis Sakamoto said.
When asked about her talent, Sakamoto said Gutierrez was “really good.”
Good or the proverbial “good for a girl”?
“She’s good, period,” Sakamoto quickly responded. “She beats a lot of the guys.”
Against girls, Gutierriez is 21-0 with 21 pins. Because of her competitiveness, though, she said she prefers wrestling boys.
That, of course, doesn’t mean the boys are always receptive to wrestling her.
At a tournament in Cupertino earlier this season, a boy she faced became frustrated as it became clear the contest wasn’t going to be the cakewalk he’d anticipated. So he decided to head butt Gutierrez, who kept her cool and – here’s a shock – ending up winning the dual.
“They especially hate it when I’m beating them,” Gutierrez said. “They don’t think girls should be allowed to play a guy sport, so they say.”
That “guy sport” is expanding its horizons, though. At the state tournament in Vallejo, nearly 350 girls participated. Even some colleges feature once-unheard-of women’s wrestling teams.
At the moment, Gutierrez is considering carrying on with her sport at Menlo and Lassen junior colleges.
In the meantime, though, she’ll continue to face the whispers and the rolling-of-the-eyes from the old guard of wrestling – many of whom don’t believe girls have any place around a mat.
“Yeah, I’ve heard people make comments,” said Gabriel Gutierrez, who coaches his daughter when she’s wresting girls, but sits in the stands when she’s going up against boys. “I say those people are living in the old days. This is the now.
“We’ve got women going to war and fighting alongside the guys. I want her to be able to defend herself.”
As for the immediate future, she’ll be defending her JV league title at next weekend’s TCALs, where she had the crowd roaring in 2004 after she lifted up her final two male opponents and disposed of them on her way to first-place.
After that, she’ll be traveling to Michigan for nationals next month. Last year she finished seventh, but nearly all of the girls who placed higher than her have already graduated.
“This year,” she said. “I’m gunning for No. 1.”
It wouldn’t be wise to doubt her.
Just ask her trail of victims.
