On Saturday, the Coppell girls wrestling team won the District 6-6A Championship at Allen High School with a score  of 111.0, qualifying the team to move on to the Class 6A Region I tournament.

“I’m really happy that we all won and I’m really proud of all the work that this team has put in to get to this point this year,” Coppell junior Scout Carrell said. 

Carrell, along with Coppell junior Maria Husian in the 95 weight class and Coppell seniors  Ananya Sampathkumar in the 102 weight class, Dorian Villaba in the 128 weight class and Tucker Sparks in the 185 weight class individually qualified for regionals, with CHS9 freshman Cassandra Bonacci in the 148 weight class, sophomore Araceli Reynoso in the 119 weight class and junior Sarah Valadez in the 138 weight class as alternates. 

“I am really happy that I am moving onto region, and I’m really glad that all my work that I’ve put into wrestling has almost paid off, and I just have two more [tournaments] to go,” Carrell said. 

With minimal practice in order to ensure safety, wrestlers were only able to compete with their fellow teammates, as opposed to the usual tournaments against other schools. 

“It was great that we all made it to regionals and that we all got to participate in the tournament together because it was the first one that we’ve been able to do since COVID started,” Hussain said. “We’ve only been able to do small duals and not a full tournament with this many teams.”

Wrestlers faced the toughest challenges against Prosper. A significant individual match in the tournament was when Sampathkumar faced a reoccurring challenge as she had to wrestle Prosper freshman Lauren Garst twice, which Sampathkumar lost the first time, but won the second time.  

“I wrestled [Garst] before, and she beat me the last time we wrestled so I had to come back and work harder and work on improving my last performance for that,” Sampathkumar said. 

As Sampathkumar, along with other seniors on the team come to their final matches, they are content with their wrestling journey.

“We all feel really satisfied with our journey,” Sampathkumar said. “We learned a lot, it has been a tough ride but we have all gotten so much out of it. Coming in, we did not know what to expect but as we put so much time and effort into our practices we learned so much so in addition to growing as a wrestler, we have also grown as people.” 

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