Cassy Lopez is rattling off her many interests. She’s an 18-year-old college freshman—a “typical teenage girl,” her father says—but she already sounds like a media-savvy pro, enthusiastically reporting that she likes kayaking and going to the beach, snowboarding in the winter, and cooking, too. She’s in three clubs (environmental, Spanish, and pre-dental). Plus, she volunteers as a big sister at a local orphanage once a week and is even in a sorority.

“I’m pretty active,” Lopez notes, without irony. She’s chatting by phone just a few weeks into her first semester this fall at Presbyterian College in South Carolina.

It’s an impressively full schedule—and we haven’t even gotten to the point of this story yet. Lopez, who graduated from Mount Hebron High last spring with a 3.31 grade-point average, is the first woman to ever earn a Division I scholarship in another one her passions—wrestling, the traditionally male-dominated sport probably known more for cauliflower ear and singlets than female participation.

It’s a milestone the petite, 106-pounder with a bright smile never expected to achieve, but it’s a status she’s quickly embraced, and one that’s drawn attention from media outlets such as ESPN and now from strangers on her college campus. Asked at the end of our conversation if she has anything more to say, Lopez pauses, then delivers some sage advice worthy of a self-help book. “Take every opportunity you can, because you never know how far it will take you,” she says. “When I first started wrestling, I was pretty nervous about doing it because I was the only girl. Never did I ever think I was going to become the first female wrestler to get a Division I scholarship.”

Last December, Presbyterian, a 1,200-student private liberal arts college, announced the creation of the first Division I women’s college wrestling program, to begin competing alongside 38 other teams in the Women’s Collegiate Wrestling Association in the winter of 2019. Lopez became the team’s first member, recruited and signed by college wrestling veteran and program director Mark Cody before the school even hired a women’s head coach. Says Paco Lopez, Cassy’s father: “It’s an unbelievable story how it all played out.”

Organized women’s wrestling dates back to at least 1987, but according to USA Wrestling, the sport’s governing body, fewer than 100 girls competed at the high school level at the time. Now, the organization estimates that more than 17,000 girls wrestle, with many grappling in one-on-one battles against the 250,000-plus boys who participate.

The women’s sport is one of the fastest growing at the high school level in the United States—12 states now sanction women’s wrestling as its own sport, with six coming in 2018 alone—and Maryland’s public schools sponsored their first high school girls state tournament in February, where 80 wrestlers competed and Lopez won the 106-pound title. Stakeholders are pushing for NCAA emerging sport recognition, too.

And no, this is not the professional women’s wrestling as depicted on the Netflix show Glow, where women with names like Zoya the Destroya and Liberty Belle dress in skimpy outfits and try to titillate the audience. This is a legitimate and hardcore sport, just like the men compete in. This new generation of female wrestlers, Lopez included, are inspired by people like Rockville native Helen Maroulis, who became the first American to win a gold medal in women’s wrestling at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.

Lopez got into wrestling by way of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art and combat sport that promotes the idea that a smaller, weaker person can successfully defend themselves against someone bigger or stronger. But even that was pure happenstance. Her younger brother, Lucas, had broken his arm skateboarding, leaving Paco wondering what to do with the membership he had purchased for his son at the Baltimore Martial Arts Academy in Catonsville.

“Why don’t you let your daughter try it out?” said the academy’s owner, Gary Berger. And with that, Lopez began taking classes.

Jiu-jitsu is all about ground fighting, and Lopez competed against boys, so when she sought a winter sport at Mount Hebron—she’d already decided against basketball (“Too short”) and track (“I don’t like running”). Wrestling seemed like a good fit.

“I could do it,” Lopez told her father, “but there’s no point. There’s no girls on the team.”

That’s when her dad, who’d wrestled for one year in high school at High Point High in Beltsville, posed an open-ended question that changed his daughter’s life. “Why not?” he asked her, pointing out that she’d “dominated boys” in jiu-jitsu the last two years.

Indeed, video of Lopez throwing some poor guy to a thick rubber mat in a jiu-jitsu tournament made its way to Mount Hebron wrestling coach Daniel Harman. He saw that Lopez had the ability, and toughness, to compete against the boys. He encouraged her to try out, and she made the team. There were still nuances to learn in wrestling—attacks, counters, setting up opponents in the three six-minute periods to try to gain advantage, score points, and get them to the ground—and, of course, there was overcoming that stigma about her gender. But “I started winning my first couple matches, and I really got some confidence in me,” she says. And she learned to love the spotlight. “I love the adrenaline rush when you step on the mat. It’s just you against another person. When you win and get your hand raised, it’s a rush of satisfaction that you put in all that hard work and sweat at practice.”

As she showed her mettle and skills, Lopez says she didn’t face much resistance from the boys on the team. She recalls just one incident, and it was from an opponent during a multi-team scrimmage. “One guy refused to wrestle me, and I still don’t know why,” she says. “He didn’t even confront me. It was my turn to wrestle, and his coach came over and said, ‘Sorry, he just can’t wrestle you.’ That was the only time that I experienced, not necessarily something uncomfortable, but someone who didn’t want to wrestle me because I was a female.”

Lopez spent two years on junior varsity, going undefeated as a sophomore to win a Howard County title. She dedicated herself to fitness and nutrition, eating a low-fat, high-protein diet. She won, in her estimation, 98 percent of her matches by headlock, earning her the nickname “The Headlock Queen.”

“Pretty much any time she would throw a headlock, the guy would end up on their back and she’d end up with a pin,” Harman says. “Countless times that happened in the gym, and then you’d have all eyes on her. Then you’d have the ‘oooh’ sound from the crowd.”

Lopez moved to varsity as a junior and senior and finished with a 45-29 record, pinning her male opponents 32 times and often bringing crowds to their feet. “It was amazing to watch how everyone cheers for her,” Paco Lopez says. “Other teams, other parents, the whole place went nuts when she got on the mat.”

She then dominated the first Maryland public school tournament for girls, pinning each of her first three opponents in 20 seconds or less before winning the championship. It was her fourth individual state championship, to go with a pair of Maryland State Wrestling Association Triple Crown Awards.

In the offseasons, Lopez trained with the Columbia-based Orange Crush club team and the Maryland Women’s National Team, which she captained in 2015. She received recruitment letters from schools in Arkansas, Georgia, and Virginia, but none felt like the right fit. She had decided she wanted to stay close to home and pursue a path that could position her for her dream job as an oral surgeon. That was inspired by her mom, who worked 18 years for a dentist. So, one year ago, Lopez went on Instagram and announced she was done with the sport.

“The wrestling world here was shocked,” her father says. “This is the No. 1 female wrestler in the state, and she’s not going to wrestle in college, especially after all these other colleges were recruiting her?”

She was planning to go to an in-state school and not wrestle at all when Kerry McCoy, the head men’s wrestling coach at the University of Maryland, who also ran girls’ training camps in College Park that Lopez attended, told her in April about the startup Division I program at Presbyterian. He intuitively knew she would be a good fit.

“She has all the qualities of a wrestler—hard work and dedication—and she’s also just an awesome person,” McCoy says.

Lopez emailed Presbyterian program director Cody, who happened to be nearby in Washington, D.C., for a banquet. After hearing about Lopez’s resume, he gladly agreed to meet the next day.

Over lunch at a D.C. hotel, Cody talked about the new team and the importance of academics. And the two even had a connection: Turns out, Cody’s father-in-law is an oral surgeon. “That helped out,” Cody says. “But it just shows that right across the board, she’s very goal-oriented. She’s the total package, and someone you can build a program around.” It was just a matter of time before an official scholarship offer was made.

Neither the program nor Lopez’s family would prefer to disclose the details of the scholarship. “All I can tell you is, what you imagine, it is,” Paco says. But Lopez made history by signing her national letter of intent in May.

“It’s great for the state of Maryland to have a representative who’s got some acclaim for women’s wrestling,” says McCoy, the Terps’ head coach, who broke ground of his own in 1997 when he was the first African-American to win the Hodge Award as the nation’s top collegiate wrestler. “It shows the direction we’re moving as a sport, to have people reach these milestones. Hopefully, years from now, it’s not a big deal if a female gets a scholarship to wrestle.”

Lopez is the first in her family to attend college, and she’s soaking up every minute of it. In addition to all the off-the-mat activities, she is a key figure in a history-making athletic program in its nascent stages, although the women’s team won’t start formal outside competition until next winter. Meanwhile, the coaches are putting Lopez and the three other women on the inaugural roster through rigorous cardio training—football field sprints, bleacher runs, and the like. A new wrestling room for the women’s and men’s teams was expected to be finished in mid-October. “Hopefully we’ll jump on the mats soon,” Lopez says.

And she’s already become something of a minor celebrity on campus. “Oh my God, you’re the wrestler,” someone recently told her, after recognizing her from a school publication. Lopez welcomes the role of ambassador and loves interacting with kids, girls, whomever, as long as they are interested in the sport. “It’s pretty flattering, and definitely an honor,” she says. “Like I said, any opportunity that comes up, I highly recommend jumping on it.”

If it’s March, then it must be time for what should be Maryland’s state sport (could they really pack 40,000 fans into Camden Yards to watch…jousting?)—and that sport, of course, is lacrosse. It’s one of the fastest—and the fastest-growing—sports in America, but that comes as no surprise to the thousands of Baltimore-area families who live and breathe lacrosse every season, all season. For those families, their only goal in life is to see Junior or Sis make varsity in high school, win the state championship, then get the grades to win a scholarship to some lacrosse-loving Division I college like the University of Virginia, Duke University, The Johns Hopkins University, or the University of Notre Dame. After that, there are adult leagues for the unrecovered grownups, and then, for the über-stars, Major League Lacrosse or an LXM Pro team. What next? They can dream of coming full circle and ending up in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame (on The Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus).

So who are Baltimore’s rising stars on the high-school level for 2014? We interviewed coaches of all the top-ranked school teams and came up with a handful of young lax masters to watch. And with the help of aficionados like Baltimorean, national lacrosse star, and STX athlete Kyle Harrison, we also dug up lots of fun facts about the lacrosse crowd (i.e., a “yard sale” is not where they buy used lax gear).

And for you lucky laxites who made our list? No pressure, kids.

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Why Lacrosse?

Right now, somewhere in Baltimore, a boy is throwing a lacrosse ball to himself off a brick wall—over and over—hoping to become the next Rob Pannell.

Who? Exactly. The leading scorer in NCAA Division I history is hardly a household name. But in lacrosse circles, the former Cornell University star is a legend. Unlike other major sports in this country, lacrosse does not promise a career of fame and fortune. Even earning a college scholarship for lacrosse is difficult: Major college teams can have rosters as large as 45, with only 12 scholarships to dish out among all players every year.

So why do kids in this region continue to choose a sport with such a seemingly low ceiling?

Shack Stanwick, a senior at The Boys’ Latin School of Maryland, is the youngest of eight kids, all of whom played collegiate lacrosse. And a backyard lacrosse game is to the Stanwicks what football was to the Kennedys. “Lacrosse gives me so many things in return,” says Stanwick, 18, who plans to play at The Johns Hopkins University next year. “I’ve made so many friends through the sport who
I’m still close with today. It’s allowed me to share a special connection with my siblings, and it has also helped me and my dad strengthen our relationship.”

“Some parents are understanding that while there’s not a whole lot of athletic scholarship dollars at the end of the rainbow, lacrosse can help in terms of admission,” says Steve Stenersen, president and CEO of US Lacrosse. “If a child’s academic standing isn’t quite good enough, lacrosse could be a determining factor.”

“It’s just fun,” says Bob Shriver, coach of Boys’ Latin. “It’s a great game to practice; it’s not the drudgery of football. It has more scoring than soccer, more people than basketball. It just gets in your soul.”

Devotees of the game say the lessons learned on the lacrosse field stay with you for a lifetime. To look into that, we tracked down a Baltimore veteran of the sport, Richard Mollett, who was something of a local lacrosse star in his day, playing first at Boys’ Latin, then at Towson State University, where, as a senior, his team won the 1974 college-division national championship. He played or coached club lacrosse for 20 years after that, but is best known as the founder and owner, along with wife Dort, of Antrim 1844, Taneytown’s award-winning historic country inn (and five-star restaurant).

“In business, I’d say lacrosse gave me the ability to know not to ever give up, and to never stop trying to get to the next level,” says Mollett. “And it ingrained in me that once you reach that next level, you can’t be satisfied with that. After you face challenges on the field for so many years, you know you can face challenges in business.”

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HISTORY LESSON

Native Roots

Flash back to the New World, dateline 1636: That’s when a Jesuit missionary first documented the Native American, all-male game of lacrosse. It got its modern name from a French word referring to “a curved stick,” but was known to most Native Americans as “little brother of war.” The first white men to adopt the game were English-speaking Montrealers, who wrote a set of rules, which led to the formation of lacrosse clubs.

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Face Off!

Did somebody say rivalries? Here are the teams to watch in the new season:

GIRLS:

Maryvale vs. Notre Dame Prep

When they meet up, forget the nice-Catholic-girl thing.

Bryn Mawr vs. Roland Park Country

They’re within spitting distance of each other (so to speak).

Anybody vs. McDonogh

They’re the team to beat!

BOYS:

Gilman vs. Boys’ Latin

Both of these teams have deep benches.

Calvert Hall vs. Loyola

Calvert Hall Coach Bryan Kelly: “A healthy rivalry dating way back, but good friends on both teams.”

St. Paul’s vs. Boys’ Latin

“They’re similar in size and compete at the same level in every sport, so it’s a natural rivalry”, says the BL coach.

McDonogh vs. Gilman

There are plenty of Division I candidates on both sides

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LOCAL LEGEND

For local lax intel, we consulted with Kyle Harrison, one of the most recognizable names in the sport. The Baltimore native graduated from Friends School and The Johns Hopkins University, earning just about every lacrosse accolade possible, then played in Major League Lacrosse before co-founding the LXM Pro League. Harrison, 30, also just launched his third-generation STX equipment line called K18.

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OFFICIAL LAXICON

LEARNING THE LINGO ON AND OFF THE FIELD

This sport, like any, has its own slang, and the faithful will find ways to work lacrosse metaphors into ordinary conversation. So, go ahead: Try to make a sentence using all of these.

Illustrations by Peter Mac

Around the world: Taking the stick around your far shoulder and behind your back on a pass or shot.

BTB: Passing or shooting the ball behind your back.

Flow: A term for boy lacrosse players who have hair coming out of their helmet—it is their flow.

Lax bro: Think lacrosse thug, with no other discernible interests or skills.

Phantom check: When a player drops the ball without being touched by a defender.

Popcorn: When a goalie makes an easy save on a high shot.

Put on skates: When a defender gets outwitted and looks like he or she is slipping on ice skates.

Top shelf: When someone scores anywhere in the top portion of the goal.

Turf monster: Usually yelled out when a player trips or stumbles without being touched.

Twig: It would be easier to just call a thing by its real name, right? Wrong—it’s slang for the stick.

Upper 90: When you shoot the ball and it hits the top corners of the goal

Yard sale: When a player’s stick gets checked out of his or her hands.

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INJURY REPORT

The most common mishaps in lacrosse*

1. Separated Shoulders

Common from a sideways fall directly on the tip of the shoulder, injuring the acromioclavicular joint.

2. Broken Wrists

The natural reflex to break a fall is to stretch out your arm so you don’t fall on your head. If the force is too great, the wrist breaks.

About 40% of lacrosse injuries are non-contact.

3. Concussions

Contact sports always include blunt-force injuries to the headthat can cause concussions.

4. Broken Thumbs

Whacks on the hand from a stick can break the thumb and is one of the most common injuries for goalies.

A broken thumb can take up to 3-4 months to heal.

5. Sprained Ankles

Rapid cuts while changing directions and dodging movements commonly cause ankle sprains.

* Courtesy of Baltimore orthopedist Dr. Spiro Antonaides.

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HANGOUTS

Where do the stick kids of Charm City gather to talk shop?

Photography by Amanda White-Iseli

Towson Hot Bagels

Starbucks

Hopkins Game Days

Rita’s Ice

Smoothie King

Orioles (or Ravens) Games

Chipotle

Bill Bateman’s Bistro

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DRAFT

Which Ravens or Orioles would excel in lacrosse?

We asked area high-school coaches to speculate on which pro ballers would tear up the turf——some interesting answers, and one name came up more than any other!

TORREY SMITH
Baltimore Ravens Wide Receiver

“Torrey Smith, with his speed and elusiveness and his ability to control his body, would make a pretty good lacrosse player,” says Brent Ritz, coach of the C. Milton Wright girls’ team.

LARDARIUS WEBB
Baltimore Ravens Cornerback

“Lardarius Webb would be just incredible because of his speed and his ability to break down opponents,” says Calvert Hall coach Bryan Kelly. “The more powerful, explosive speed you have, the better.”

RAY RICE
Baltimore Ravens Running Back

“Ray Rice is pretty shifty,” says Jessica Vitrano Randisi, coach of Maryvale Prep. “Speed is number one, because you can’t teach speed,” says Becky Groves, coach of the Century High girls’ team.

MATT WIETERS
Baltimore Orioles Catcher

“Matt Wieters has unbelievable hands and a cannon for an arm,” Ritz says. “He seems to react and read things quickly, so I think he would be a
great feeder on the team.”

ADAM JONES
Baltimore Orioles Outfielder

Traded to the Orioles from the Seattle Mariners for the 2008 season, outfielder Jones was one of the coaches’ picks as a potential lax star.

CHRIS DAVIS
Baltimore Orioles First Baseman

His 130 career home runs (he surpassed Brady Anderson for the O’s record of most home runs in a single season) would translate well to the lacrosse field, say coaches.

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TEAMS TO WATCH

2014 IT’S THEIRS TO LOSE

Here are some of the teams that did especially well in the past season in various leagues*

GIRLS

• McDonogh School
• Marriotts Ridge High School
• Good Counsel School
• Mt. Hebron High School
• St. Paul’s School
• C. Milton Wright High School
• Broadneck High School
• Century High School
• The Bryn Mawr School
• Maryvale Preparatory School
• North Harford High School

BOYS

• The Boys’ Latin School of Maryland
• Westminster High School
• Gilman School
• Loyola Blakefield
• Hereford High School
• McDonogh School
• St. Paul’s School
• Calvert Hall High School
• Severn School

* According to Baltimore-based US Lacrosse.