A layer of gold was added to Righetti High School wrestler Zevra Robinson’s solid purple singlet when she took home first place from the ASICS Napa Valley Classic wrestling tournament last month, decorating her with the proper colors of a true Warrior.
The Napa Valley Classic is one of the most competitive all-women’s wrestling tournaments in the state, according to Curt Greeley, the women’s wrestling coach. The most impressive fact about Robinson’s achievement is that she’s only been wrestling on the team for one year.
As a sophomore, Robinson couldn’t join the team due to a low GPA she said. Her desire to wrestle for the school encouraged her to perform better in her academics and she boosted her GPA in time for her junior year.
Robinson was encouraged to try out for the wrestling team by her brother after she told him about her desire to lose weight and her search for an outlet to curb her anger issues. Since joining the team, she said she’s more relaxed and doesn’t get mad as easily.
However, the weight she wanted to lose didn’t materialize as she had hoped. Rather than shedding the pounds, she developed a healthy dose of muscle, giving her an edge and making her fit to compete at the heavy-weight division.
Though Robinson claims she’s lazy by nature, she’s encouraged by her teammates and her coach, Greeley, who help fuel her desire to win. She listed these elements as the essential factors that helped her take home gold from the Napa Valley Classic.
During the tournament, she fought her way up to the championship match.
“I was kind of nervous at first, but then my coach said I could do it. I wanted to be champion, so I pushed myself to become a champion,” Robinson said.
In his recollection of the match, Greeley described the score see-sawing back and forth, each girl matching the other’s takedown, until both their efforts advanced the match to sudden death, where the next takedown would decide the victor.
As Robinson stared at her opponent across the mat she found the encouragement within herself: “I want this. I really want this. I want this so bad. I’m going to take her down,” Robinson recalls thinking to herself. “I was so tired, too. But I kinda just pushed myself,” she said.
This article appears in Feb 2-9, 2012.