Karen Salais

Age 16 | School Calexico | Grade 10

For Karen Salais, her sophomore year at Calexico High School has been all about getting bigger, faster, stronger. Well, faster and stronger anyway.

Bulk is not really her bag.

Salais is a wrestler, and she plies her trade down at the featherweight end of the end of the spectrum, competing in the 106-pound division.

She’s a heady student of the game, and despite being just three years into her wrestling career, she’s already made quite a name for herself.

Last year, she was the CIF-SDS champ in her division and was named the Most Outstanding Wrestler in a lower weightclass after pinning all of her opponents at the sectional finals in Brawley.

From there she went on to the state championships in Bakersfield, where she was the only local wrestler to make it onto the podium, placing sixth.

As results go, that’s not bad at all, especially for a freshman, but Salais doesn’t feel too fondly about it. She wants more and better.

She felt that the main reason she found herself on the wrong end of some of her later matches was due to her physical disadvantage.

“They beat me by strength,” she said, “So that’s what I’m working on. I don’t want it to happen again.”

Cue the workout montage. Pumping iron, running sprints … Salais has been doing it all, confident that once she’s in “better condition, with better strength,” she’ll be able to “win state.”

Explosiveness, in particular, is what she’s after, and she said she feels like she’s already made significant progress.

The 201920 season has been “really good so far,” she said. “[I’ve improved] a lot from last year to this year.”

For evidence, there’s her performance at the Fourth Annual Ayala Women’s Wrestling Invitational in Chino Hills last Saturday.

There she was tops in the 106-pound division. She thoroughly vivisected her bracket, winning five straight matches by pin and spending just five total minutes on the mat.

Most of those minutes came in the semifinals, where Serenity Durham

Goree was able to stand the gaff for three whole minutes before Salais nailed her down. The actual final, by contrast, was over in the blink of an eye, with Salais pinning San Ysidro’s Sandy Luevano within milliseconds.

The result there, she said, announces that “I’m here and I’m gonna wrestle hard.”