Jensen Beach Club Debuts Florida's First All-Girls Duals Wrestling Team

When Lily Calzadilla was six years old, she walked into the Jensen Beach High School wrestling room while her brother was at practice and asked if she could do what he was doing. She was told no. There was no girls program. End of story — or so it seemed.

Eight years later, Lily is 14. She can break down the difference between folkstyle and freestyle wrestling with the confidence of a veteran. She is a founding member of what coaches and officials say is Florida's first all-girls duals wrestling team, built inside Team Barracuda Wrestling Club on the Treasure Coast.

"If they get to wrestle, why can't I?" Lily said. "When we play basketball, we play basketball together, so I didn't really see a difference."

That question — stubborn, simple, unanswerable — is the origin story of something genuinely historic for Treasure Coast sports.

Team Barracuda was founded in 2006 by coach Tom McMath and has grown from three athletes to roughly 70, practicing year-round out of the Jensen Beach High wrestling room. The club draws athletes from Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Palm Beach counties. The girls team carries six official members, but because many girls in the region lack programs of their own, others travel in from surrounding areas just to get mat time.

Coach Anthony Calzadilla — Lily's father — made a point of reaching out to female wrestlers who go dormant in the offseason while their male counterparts keep training. "He reached out to athletes and offered them a place to train so they would enter the school season with a full offseason of reps already banked," Calzadilla explained.

That recruitment has paid off in ways that go beyond tournament brackets. Eight-year-old Raven Borsman came over from a different program after losing to a Team Barracuda girl at her first tournament and deciding she wanted to be on the winning side of that equation.

"From the other team to Team Barracuda, it's really switched — my game switched, everything switched," Borsman said.

Her mother, Tara Borsman, said Raven is no longer intimidated to wrestle boys because she has watched the older girls do it without hesitation. That role-model pipeline — older athletes lifting younger ones simply by showing up and competing — may be the team's most durable contribution.

Lily feels the weight of that responsibility. "I love wrestling. I love the sport," she said, "but I wish I had one person that I could see practicing in the room that I could have looked up to and thought, 'I want to be like that.'"

McMath, who has coached on the Treasure Coast for nearly two decades, said the sport transcends gender. "Boy or girl, it's about the sport of wrestling and what it does for you as a human," he said.

The team competes nearly every weekend, with athletes choosing their own bracket load depending on skill level and schedule. From fall through winter, they train in folkstyle — the traditional format used in Florida high school competition. Come spring, Team Barracuda shifts to international styles: freestyle and Greco-Roman, the same disciplines contested at the Olympics.

This article was generated with AI assistance using publicly available information. It was reviewed and approved by a human editor before publication. TC Sentinel uses AI writing tools in accordance with FTC guidelines.