Athlete of the week: Delarie Juarez

Age 12 | School Frank Wright | Grade 7

Delarie Juarez has never led Major League Baseball in home runs, batting average or runs batted-in.

She’s never won the Kentucky Derby, or the Belmont, or the Preakness.

In fact, she doesn’t have a thing to do with baseball or horse racing. Nevertheless, Delarie Juarez — an incoming seventh-grader at Frank Wright Middle School in Imperial — is a triple-crown winner.

How so?

Wrestling that’s how.

In the United States there are three forms of wrestling that are widely practiced and overseen by the sport’s national governing body, USA Wrestling.

Those forms are freestyle, Greco-Roman and folkstyle. Freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling are the two variations contested at the Olympic level, while folkstyle is an amalgam of different wrestling traditions and is primarily practiced in the United States at the interscholastic level.

Greco-Roman is the most stylistically distinct, barring any holds below the waist, while freestyle and folkstyle are kissing cousins with subtler differences (for instance folkstyle doesn’t allow the clasping of hands in locks).

Triple crown awards then, are given out to wrestlers who excel in all three styles, winning USA Wrestling championships

in each.

That’s what Juarez did at the USA Wrestling Western States Championships in Pocatello, Idaho, last weekend where she booked three first-place finishes in the 12U 90-95 pound division.

Overall she ran up a match record of 8-0 with six wins coming by pin against competition coming from as far away as Hawaii.

It was an incredible performance for somebody who first took up wrestling just three years ago because she wanted to make sure she “beat [her] brother in medals” and spent some of her earliest practices (unsuccessfully) fighting back tears.

She’s not sure exactly what happened between then and now to flip the switch, but she’s inclined to give credit to “really strict coaching” for the turnaround.

Whatever the trigger may have been, she seems to be all in now, part of a growing local girls’ wrestling scene that she’s doing her part to make even larger, going so far as to canvas for new recruits.