NATHANIEL MATA | THE MONITOR
SAN JUAN — Joseph Villanueva wrestled for PSJA High 10 years ago. Now in his second season as the school’s head wrestling coach, his team is on the right side of a rebuild.
He returned to campus in 2014 as an assistant coach. Ashbby Alvarado was a freshman that year who joined the team after her sister showed her some moves she learned in the school’s wrestling class.
“I wasn’t anything about wrestling. I was a dancer before, so this is a totally different thing,” Alvarado said.
Villanueva said it’s usually a stroke of luck when a sibling pushes students to his wrestling mats. Even then, most of the time the potential wrestlers are raw — strong individuals who can turn into studs with training and technique.
“My freshman year, I would win some and lose some, but mostly lose some,” Alvarado admitted about her early days. “But now it’s more like, ‘Oh, you’re going to go against Ashbby from Bears.’ They know what’s coming.”
She qualified for regionals as a freshman but didn’t return to that level until her junior season, giving her plenty of motivation for her final year.
As a senior, Alvarado won gold in the South Texas Throwdown in McAllen. At the Craig T. Grace CenTex tournament, one of the state’s biggest non-district tournaments of the season, she earned silver, falling to Devin Patton of Coppell High, who is ranked No. 8 in the state according to TexasWrestling.com.
“I’ve never really had a full girls team, so we’re sharing all these memories together,” Alvarado said.
Alvarado has been an important part of the team’s growth as a whole, recruiting teammates like fellow senior Jaden Trevino.
“When I started my freshman year, the program wasn’t really that big,” Alvarado said. “We wouldn’t have that much support. Now that we have new coaches, it’s been totally different. Last year, I started to notice. But this year, it’s been a really good season for us.”
Alvarado also has an uncanny ability to recruit classmates and peers to the sport. Her brash approach might be the secret.
“First I ask them, ‘Hey, how much do you weigh?’” Alvarado said. “(If) I see they’re kind of aggressive, they’re not shy or anything, I tell them, ‘Come try it out.’”
Trevino needed some extra convincing.
“My friends encouraged me. My coaches encouraged me,” Trevino said. “I joined for a few matches, I liked it, and then over the years I fell in love with it, and it just became a passion to me.”
Trevino is taking on the challenge of wrestling at 110 pounds as a senior after spending most of his time at 106, where he won a district title as a junior.
He said he owes the success and improvement to his coaches.
“I learned everything by them,” Trevino said. “All the techniques, all the hard work — they helped me a lot. Since freshman year, through my senior year.”
Destiny Baltierra, a junior, is another athlete who has taken off in the past few seasons. As a sophomore, she finished third in the 165 division during the district meet. This season, she’s turned up the heat. Baltierra earned first place at the prestigious CenTex after beating DeUndria Anderson of Beeville Jones 3-0.
Now, she’s ranked fifth according to WrestlingTexas and represents the Bears’ best shot at a state medal.
“When I first began, I thought I was pretty in shape. But when I joined I was like, ‘Whoa, this is something different, something new, something exciting,’” Baltierra said.
She went on to explain why wrestling is a good teacher of bigger lessons in life.
“It’s not about being physically strong,” Baltierra said. “It’s actually about being mentally strong. That’s been my quote all along from wrestling.”
Like Trevino, Villanueva got into wrestling via perseverance.
In 2007, Abel Saenz, the current head wrestling coach at Edinburg High, convinced some of the football players to give it a shot.
He said he was the only one from his group of friends to stick with wrestling. Ten years later, as the sport grows in popularity in the region, he still acknowledges the struggle to get numbers but says the results are worthwhile.
“We don’t get the jocks, the popular kids. We get whatever we can find,” Villanueva said. “It’s an amazing feeling when they go all throughout the four years and you see them progress little by little. They start off as this little tiny fish, and they become this big ol’ shark.”
District wrestling is underway in the RGV. Today, District 16-5A will hold championship matches at Grulla High School. On Friday and Saturday, the District 16-6A tournament will unfold at Edinburg North High School.