By Mark Gregory
Sports Editor
@Hear_The_Beard
mark@buglenewspapers.com
Fargo.
Most people know it as the 1996 Coen brother’s movie starring Frances McDormand and William H. Macy.
In wrestling circles, however, Fargo means something completely different.
Fargo, North Dakota is the home of the Cadet and Junior National Championships – the most prestigious tournament of its kind in the country.Image may be NSFW.
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It was there last summer that Louisa Schwab burst on the scene with a 5-1 win over fellow Illinois competitor, Randi Robison of East Peoria in the championship match at 122 pounds of the U.S. Marine Corps USA Wrestling Cadet Women’s Freestyle Nationals.
That title helped Schwab earn the No. 2 spot on the National Girls High School Rankings when they were released last month.
The rankings, as comprised by, National Wrestling Hall of Fame, USA Wrestling and FloWrestling created the national rankings to recognize the top high school girl wrestlers in the nation.
Schwab, a sophomore at Joliet West, is No. 2 at 122 behind Grace Figueroa, a senior from Selma High School in Sanger, California.
The Plainfield resident is one of three Illinois wrestlers on the list at 122, leading Robinson and Kerigan McKenna, a senior from Yorkville High School.
“It was pretty cool when I saw it and I got kind of excited and now I just want to see if I can get it to the No. 1 spot in the future,” she said.
While Schwab competes in the girls tournaments in the summer, in the winter she is part of the Joliet West boys wrestling team.
“She is an important part of the team. She has wrestled mostly JV this year and she has a winning record and most of her wins are by pin, so she is a pinner,” said West coach Chuck Rumpf. “She is a captain, so she is a leader, and if she makes the varsity lineup or not, she is smart and she sees this as a mechanism to get to her goals and she has big goals. If she wrestles with the guys in the winter, that will help her with the girls in the summer.
“I have never coached anyone like Louisa, that’s for sure. I have never had a national champ at Joliet West. She is the only one, guy or girl, who has won Fargo. It has been fun to coach her.”
Schwab said her goals during the winter season are not to have the best record or win the most tournaments – it is to get better for when she wrestles her peers in the summer.
“It has been a fun and I can definitely see the growth and the change,” Schwab said of wrestling against the boys. “A lot of the guys I wrestle with now, I have known for a long time and it gets a little difficult because when you’re younger you can keep up with them and beat them, but as they get bigger, they out muscle you, but it is still fun to be able to wrestle them. Obviously, the older I get, the more girl tournaments there are and I can branch out to that, but I still get to wrestle with them.
“There is a reason they have it separated between the men and the women – at a certain age there is a physicality difference and getting beat up a little bit really helps me. Then when I wrestle the girls, I can feel the difference and that is to my advantage, I know when I wrestle the guys, I am not always going to win all the time and that doesn’t really bother me. It gives me the confidence when I wrestle girls because I know I put the practice in and worked harder and it makes a huge difference.”
Schwab gets what she wants during the high school season, as the guys do not take it easy on her.
“They treat me the same as everyone else and that is all I have ever asked for,” she said. “It would almost be an insult if they took it easy on me.”
Rumpf said he never had to talk to his wrestlers about how to treat Schwab.
“I have never had to say anything to one. It was just kind of understood,” he said. “I never had to pull them aside or anything. They just see her as another part of the team.”
That idea of treating Schwab as another wrestler is something she wanted from the beginning, said Elias Medina, president and head coach of the Bolingbrook Junior Raiders wrestling club, where Schwab competed her seventh and eighth grade years.
“When she was in seventh grade, I had Jimmy Pierandozzi and Nick Stemmet and other tough kids. So, she worked out with all these guys and the first thing I told her is I was just going to treat her as a wrestler and she never asked for any kind of special treatment,” Medina said. “As a matter of fact, there were times she got banged up I had to pull her aside. She actually had more to overcome because she could have easily said, ‘my shoulder hurts or my neck,’ because I knew she was banged up, but she was not going to be the one to come out. That is just how tough she is. The best thing we did as a club was from the day she came in to the day she left, we treated her only as a wrestler because that is what she wanted.”
Her growth has taken her to so far already as just a sophomore, but why did Schwab decide wrestling was the sport she wanted to compete in?
“My dad wrestled in high school and my brother actually did MMA and Jiu-Jitsu when we were younger and I kind of started doing it with him and then once I got into fifth grade I want to do a school sport so this is the closest thing to that as I could get to, and I just stuck with us throughout the years,” she said.
She is now hoping wrestling takes her even further – like college or following in the footsteps of Lockport graduate Haley Augello, who finished seventh in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.
“I feel like we are still really small compared to men’s college wrestling, for example, but I feel like the more people I can get to come in at the younger age – everybody below me – is what really matters because they are the ones that are going to make the sport bigger. Once all these other colleges start accepting women’s wrestling and they are including into their programs, then we are going to have so many more people,” she said. “There a couple colleges that I have looked at that I like, but I have a feeling that in the future there are more colleges that will start offering it. They will start to notice it’s not really expensive.”
With two years left to decide on a college program, Schwab has more immediate goals.
Right now, I am focusing on Body Bar (Women’s National Championships) to get on a National Team and placing again at Fargo,” she said.
Whatever she does, will never be a surprise to her coaches.
“It is fun to watch her wrestle because none of this came as a shock to me. When people read this article, people will be impressed because they see the more finished product,” Medina said. “But seeing her coming up, I am not amazed where she is because her work ethic was second to none in the room and that is with a room full of guys who are now ranked in the top five in the state.”