A teenager from Bowie, Maryland, has already collected multiple gold medals, including back-to-back wins at the Pan-American games in South America, and is ranked No. 1 in the country among female wrestlers (not the scripted kind you see on TV).
Before you know it, she’ll be highly ranked among boys, too, and likely before she’s even able to drive a car legally.
Taina Fernandez, 14, is in the middle of her freshman year at Archbishop Spalding High School in Severn but for the last 10 years, she’s been competing on the mat against girls and boys.
“My parents wanted to put me in a sport and I tried lots of different things out,” said Fernandez. “I tried lacrosse, soccer, like the typical sports that girls do. But then I kind of just like fell in love with wrestling when I tried it out. It was just random. And then I just kept wanting to come back.”
Now, she describes it as a passion, and the girls who compete against her have a hard time keeping up.
The last time she lost a match in a women’s competition was last year in a college tournament, losing against a nearly 30-year-old woman on the Canadian national team. Fernandez said she doesn’t remember losing a match for a while before then.
“I think I was like, nine or 10 or something like that,” she said. “I don’t know, maybe earlier than that.”
This year, Fernandez is also wrestling for Spalding, one of the top wrestling programs in the state of Maryland.
Between international competitions and a recent injury, she hasn’t wrestled many matches against boys. But when she has, she’s generally won. Her only loss came in a tournament against a teammate of hers at Spalding.
“She ended up almost beating my starter who’s a state champ,” said Spalding wrestling coach Mike Laidley, who has spent more than two decades with the program. “It was like a close, two-point match, came down to the end. And then she took third and beat” a boy who placed fifth in the national championship tournament. “So right there, we all knew she was the real deal.”
High school wrestling has always had the occasional girl who participates, but it doesn’t happen often and it can be a tricky situation for coaches and other teammates to handle. It’s something Laidley has never dealt with before this year.
“You know, boys are boys. But that’s not been a problem and actually worked out pretty well,” he said. “And I think they’ve grown to accept her because we don’t show her special attention. She works as hard, if not harder than, all the boys in her room. And she never complains. So she’s won them over as teammates. They really enjoy her and she’s a great fit.”
Fernandez will tell you it’s also making her a better wrestler.
“A lot of girls are just starting to get into wrestling. When I’m with boys, and especially the boys [that] I’m practicing [against], they don’t take it easy on me or treat me differently,” she said. “I’m actually able to get a really good feel against the opponent who’s naturally a little more stronger and has a little better technique than some of the girls that I get to go up against. So, I’m really thankful for the opportunity, it just gives me a chance to really clean up my technique so that when I’m going against the girls, I can do my very best, like dominate them.”
Down the line, Laidley has high expectations for Fernandez.
“We know she’s going to be a starter for this program. And whatever weight class she ends up settling in on, I think she’s got a realistic goal of winning a state title,” he said. “I think she’d be the first female in this state to ever win a boys’ state title.”
“A lot of people talk about me off the mat, but wrestling with boys, like they can talk all they want, have opinions about me before I step on the mat,” she said. “But once I step on the mat, it kind of gives me a chance to just block that out and just focus on the opponent that’s in front of me. And with boys, I just know that I have like nothing to lose, regardless of what people may say.”
Laidley said, “She’s a wrestler. People in the wrestling world that don’t know her or haven’t seen her, they still think ‘Well she’s a female wrestler, how good can she be against the boys?’ Well, they just need to come out watch her.”
In the meantime, she’s been crushing the competition in tournaments against other girls — and women who are in college.
She recently took first place in the Ken Kraft Midlands Women’s Championships in Illinois. She outscored her opponents, all of whom were in college, including a national champion, by a combined 42-1.
“Honestly, it’s kind of crazy. But I kind of just take it one milestone at a time because my ultimate goal is to win the Olympics in the year 2028. And I still haven’t accomplished that yet,” she said.
But it’s still only 2024.
“We have no doubt that she’ll reach her goal,” said Laidley, who has seen Spalding send numerous wrestlers to Division I programs in college, but never the Olympics. “It’s a realistic goal for Taina and, seeing how she works in a room and how goal oriented she is, I have no doubt that she’ll get there.”
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