DOING IT HER WAY
Szkotnicki an unexpected gift to South River wrestling; now she’s hoping to make history
Alex Szkotnicki didn’t understand why she wasn’t asked to join the wrestling team. She was in kindergarten, and her youth football coach enlisted everyone on her team to try wrestling — everyone but her. She asked her mother why. Szkotnicki remembers being told she probably didn’t really want to wrestle anyway. Her response? “Now I do.” From then on, Szkotnicki dedicated herself to what had once been a boys-dominated sport that is growing rapidly among girls in Maryland and beyond. She loved football, but she was small. Wrestling delivered her the physicality she craved, the challenges she loved to tangle with and the empowerment of being able to compete against opponents her size.
This year, Szkotnicki captured titles at the prestigious Super 32 and Junior National Championships. She made the U17 World Team in 2019. And the senior, the No. 9 pound-for-pound high school wrestler and top-ranked 112-pounder in the country, according to FloWresting, is committed to threetime defending NCAA champion McKendree.
It didn’t matter to her what people thought she was capable of: If they thought she couldn’t, then she simply would. She was going to do it her way.
“You throw a challenge at her,” South River coach John Klessinger said, “and she thrives in it.”
Flash forward more than a decade from the moment she decided to become a wrestler. After years of homeschooling, traversing the country and stacking gold medals, Szkotnicki discussed with her mom earning a high school diploma and experiencing a high-level academic environment before she went to college. And a few months into her first year at South River High, she joined the school’s wrestling team.
Szkotnicki has more than proved herself to be an irreplaceable addition to the Seahawks roster. She heads into this weekend’s Class 4A/3A East Regional tournament with a 42-5 record and as a county champion — the second girl in Anne Arundel County history and first since Arundel’s Nicole Woody in 2007, who famously made a run to the state final. She already played a key role in helping the Seahawks defend their 4A state dual meet championship Feb. 11, first with a 51-23 victory over
Sherwood in the semifinals, then a 42-28 win over Urbana to cap the repeat.
But now, her winter of learning how to compete on a high school team is essentially done. With no team events remaining, she’s onto the individual tournament, which in Maryland splits into boys and girls brackets to battle for the spot atop the podium on March 4 at The Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro.
And Szkotnicki’s competing against the boys.
She has the chance to become the first girl in Maryland history to claim a state title against boys. That was always her plan this winter. She’s wrestled against boys her whole life — including many of her likely opponents coming up — and has proved to this point that she’s capable of getting it done. It made sense for her to finish her one-year high school career her way.
But around the middle of the season, the judgment started rolling in.
“People started saying stuff,” Szkotnicki said, “that I shouldn’t be allowed to compete in the girls states. That I’d be taking away a title from another girl.”
Szkotnicki, a girl, was not welcome by some to compete in the girls state tournament, she thought?
It baffles her still, but she figures her competition history is coloring her naysayers’ conceptions of her.
That said, she’d always planned to grapple with the boys on the biggest stage in March.
“But I don’t like being told I can’t do something that I can very clearly do,” Szkotnicki said.
During the first week of practice, Szkotnicki slammed her knee on a box jump and walked around with a knot and gash for weeks. Coaches checked in with her nervously, but she kept coming back as if nothing happened. Just before the county tournament last week, Szkotnicki fell off a treadmill, and shook it off. South River assistant coach David Hicks remembers watching Szkotnicki suffer a bloody nose in practice. Rather than ask for some tissue to plug it up, the senior pinched her nose with one hand and kept wrestling with the other.
“That’s stuff you only see college wrestlers do,” Hicks said.
Szkotnicki has not been perfect. She’s taken five losses: two against last year’s 106-pound state champion, Drew Montgomery of Northern-Calvert; a close defeat to a highly ranked wrestler from C. Milton Wright; one to a Loyola Blakefield wrestler and another from Virginia.
That’s where her veteran status shows the most.
“I’ve never seen her handle it in a negative way. She comes off the same way as the ones she wins,” Klessinger said. “She’s business-like, not a lot of emotion. She’s getting better at expressing the emotion, almost showing she’s happy she won.”
The wins have far outweighed the defeats, and they’d been much-needed for the Seahawks.
Graduation hit South River hard after last year’s state dual title, the first in program history. Szkotnicki’s bonus-point victories — often pins or technical falls — set the pace or altered the momentum of South River’s victories, including in several of its postseason wins.
Klessinger, a Division I NCAA Tournament qualifier in 1997 who has coached South River for decades, noticed her in the hallway the very first week of school. He hadn’t seen her since she was a little kid; his recollections of her were fuzzy. But she was wearing a wrestling T-shirt , and the image triggered the memory.
He approached her and asked why she wasn’t in his weight-training class. In response, she had enough on her plate to reacclimate herself to public school, she said. Klessinger rounded up seniors Ismael Tamayo, Sam Ditmars and Ben Travis for a recruiting mission.
“You’ll know her when you see her,” the coach told them. Tamayo had a class with her. Ford found her in school. Klessinger didn’t know Szkotnicki was already considering it, but he put the work to bring her in the room anyway.
The beginning was awkward, Klessinger admitted. South River wrestlers were typically football converts, and many, such as Ditmars, were competing year-round. But Szkotnicki carried a resume featuring national titles, one that remains unmatched in the Seahawks practice room.
It all happened quickly. She become a mentor to the other boys around her weight class and guided practices like an assistant coach. They helped her, too. She adopted South River’s wrestling style on her own. They loved competing alongside her, Klessinger said, and she loved competing alongside them.
It didn’t matter she was a newcomer. Partway through the season, the team named her captain.
Szkotnicki has been on teams with boys before. On those squads, some boys teased her, and she often returned the favor on the mat.
But not South River. Everyone treated her like one of their own, Szkotnicki said. It was all something new to the accomplished wrestler.
“I love going out there and helping my team, helping them feel motivated, encouraged to do their best. It helps me stay motivated to do my best,” she said. “It feels good that I’ve been able to help the guys on the mat, and they have my back if I need them and I have theirs if they need me.”
It’s not just her wrestling world that’s changed. Before winning her match in the state dual meet championship match against Urbana, Szkotnicki danced around the mat, lipsyncing to cheesy songs, engaging her teammates to join her.
“It’s not always easy for me to open up like that,” she said. “But I’ve been with these guys long enough that I could.”
Her individual goals are not finished just because the team competitions are. Winning the 113-pound state title would not be just a personal feat for Szkotnicki. She looks to Woody, who came before her, and to Helen Maroulis, who before becoming the first American woman to win Olympic gold in 2016 was the first girl to place at the Maryland state tournament a decade earlier.
“I’m hoping that I inspire other girls to be like, ‘Hey, she went out there and did this. I can do it too,’” she said. “Nicole Woody, Helen Maroulis, they were up there first. They showed girls can hang with the guys. I hope to be like them and inspire other girls.”