When Julia Mullane was only a Freshman she became the first girl to win a junior varsity Wrestling Tournament in Hauppauge School History! Julia won three matches at 120 lbs in the Long Island Lutheran Sorensen Wrestling Tournament! Julia Mullane is now a senior on Hauppauge Wrestling. Throughout her years of wrestling, she has been the only girl on the wrestling team since seventh grade. 

Julia got into wrestling because her older brother did jiu-jitsu and after he convinced her to try it out she fell in love with the sport. Since there is a bit of wrestling within jiu-jitsu, she decided to start wrestling to help advance her jiu-jitsu game. Wrestling and jiu-jitsu are the only sports she has ever done and in both, she had mostly trained with and competed against guys, so she feels very comfortable competing against boys. All of my teammates are boys and they’ve never made her uncomfortable in any way. The guys on her team and others do not intimidate her, but they feel much more intimidated by other girls. It generally takes a certain toughness for a person to get involved in such a physical sport where your teammates and opponents typically have a physical advantage against you, so when she sees another girl on the mat she knows she’s tough. Since there are not many girls that participate in wrestling, the ones that do participate are hardcore. Maybe even tougher than the guys.

In most ways, she does get the same opportunities as other teammates. This is a sort of equality versus equity conversation. Although people are often hesitant to say it, boys have a physical advantage over girls. This means girls have to go above and beyond in regards to technique and working out in order to match the competition. Because of this, girls like her arguably do not receive the same opportunities as the boys, but there are lots of people working hard to change that. There was a long-island championship organized for girls this year and next year there is going to be a state championship, so opportunities for female wrestlers are definitely increasing. Even when it comes to continuing wrestling into college, things are improving. Girl’s wrestling is beginning to expand beyond the mid-west with teams like Sacred Heart in New England. Even then though, in college girls wrestle freestyle which means a lot of the effort they put in high school gets lost because high school wrestling is folkstyle. Julia’s parents have always been very supportive of her. Her parents encourage her wrestling. This includes making last-minute runs to the store for tournament food or dropping her off at the school on weekends before 6 am. Other than that she believes her main support system is her coaches. Her coaches have always seemed to have more confidence in me than I have in myself and any time I have a question they’re more than happy to teach me.