CYPRESS — Valley wrestling officials and coaches couldn’t remember the last time the RGV produced two girls state champions in the same year.
They won’t have to look back very far anymore.
McAllen Memorial’s Serenity De La Garza and PSJA High’s Jessica Villanueva each completed an unblemished season, pinning their opponents in the championship match of their weight classes to claim gold at the UIL state wrestling championships Saturday at the Berry Center in Cypress.
Serenity De La Garza improved to 31-0 — all wins by pins — with a fall over Azle’s Alicen Dillard, who dropped her first match of the season. Likewise, Villanueva improved to 40-0, pinning Euless Trinity’s Shenita Lawson at the 2:50 mark. Lawson held the best record of all wrestlers in the event at 50-0 going into the finals.
Serenity’s twin sister Eternity De La Garza, finished second in the 165-pound weight class and PSJA Memorial’s Lorena Torres earned a third place in what was a very successful tournament for Valley girls.
Several Valley boys also fought their way onto the podium, including Sharyland High’s Paolo Miranda (120 pounds) and Noel Torres (138), PSJA Memorial’s Alberto Elizondo (152) and Weslaco High’s Roman Saldana (285). All four boys captured fifth place. Saldana’s came in the 6A division, the rest were in 5A.
De La Garza was injured during her first match Friday but still earned the pin in 5 minutes, 5 seconds. After going to the hospital to check on her collarbone — which she said she felt a pop somewhere in that vicinity — she came back to pin her next three opponents in 7 minutes, 11 seconds combined. Before the state tournament, De La Garza hadn’t wrestled for more than two minutes in any single match. She and her coach estimated that she wrestled in matches for maybe an hour total to earn those 31 wins, showing her dominance.
During her championship match, De La Garza was having some early difficulty and trailed 7-5 at one point. Battling from the standing position her opponent took her down twice. One time when she tried to throw De La Garza, her arm popped and the match was stopped for injury time.
De La Garza immediately turned away from the injured opponent.
“It’s happened before where something like that will happen and she will freak out,” McAllen Memorial head coach Eddie Gonzalez said. “I just told her to stay calm and be ready because she was going to come back more angry. I told Serenity to not lose focus and just keep working.”
He also told her to stop wrestling from the standing position.
“I told her to go to the bottom and grab those ankles,” he said. “Then she got that reversal and that was all she needed.”
Now her plans are to work harder and make a return to the state tournament next year to defend her title. And, along the way, keep her 32-match winning streak alive, which started when she captured third place last year. In the past two seasons, the junior is 47-1 and most assuredly will once again be the top-ranked girls wrestler in her weight class next year by wrestlingtexas.com.
Villanueva went two and out last year at the state meet, wrestling and losing both of her matches and ending her tournament during Day 1. This year, the PSJA senior had two of the quickest pins of the state tournament, winning her first-round match in 32 seconds and her semifinal match in just 29 seconds. There was plenty of anticipation as well for her championship match, with a combined record of the two wrestlers at 89-0.
“She was 50-0, really? I’m glad I didn’t know that,” Villanueva said after the match. Like with De La Garza, Villanueva started slow but, as she has done all year, she outworked her opponent for the title. Once Villanueva took control of the match, she did what she’s done all season — dominate with power and technical skills.
“It’s amazing. I got that reversal on her and turned her over for a pin and got it,” Villanueva said. “It has been a lot of hard work the past four years to get here and this last year I made it count and going out with a boom. This year, my motivation was bigger. This is for my family. This is for all of them.”