Alicia Hubbard steps to the center of the burgundy mat in early August. Tying her long black hair into a loose bun on top of her head, she sizes up the competition: a teenage boy who is about three inches taller.
The whistle blows, and her male opponent, Nico Gasparrini, quickly puts the 5-foot-3 Hubbard in a headlock and pins her to the mat. Moments later, Hubbard is down once again, but this time, she has her arms and legs squeezed tightly around her challenger’s ankles and neck.
The whistle sounds for the final time, and Hubbard, having released her grip, now skips around the Springfield gymnasium, smiling from ear to ear.
“I feel pretty proud,” says the 21-year-old wrestler from Northampton. “We train with guys, and that’s hard. I think if I can beat a guy at my weight, I can beat any woman at my weight.”
Hubbard is one of 20 wrestlers – including two other women – training at Springfield Technical Community College as part of the New England All-Stars Wrestling Club. It is led by Anibal Nieves, a former Olympian and Pan American Games medal winner who is the wrestling coach at Western New England College in Springfield. (See related story)
“Alicia has what good-quality wrestlers have, and that’s heart,” Nieves says. “She actually believes that she can do something with (wrestling) and that’s why I’m dedicated to her.”
Hubbard, who graduated from Northampton High School in 2005, says her goal is to reach the 2012 Olympics – though she readily admits there is a long way to go before that dream can become a reality.
“I have to take baby steps,” she says. “The key for me is just a lot of experience: as many matches as possible, as many international tournaments as possible.”
The Beijing Olympics are the second at which women’s wrestling is a competitive sport. Female wrestlers from 30 different countries are vying for gold medals, which will be awarded in four weight classes today and Sunday.
Hubbard competes in the 121-pound (55 kilos) weight class in freestyle, the style of wrestling most practiced by women and the one used in Olympic competition.
Hubbard began wrestling competitively during her senior year in high school, but did not seriously contemplate pursuing the sport professionally until a friend told her in the fall of 2006 that she could wrestle in Springfield.
“When I was in high school, soccer was my main focus,” says Hubbard, who also played lacrosse. However, tearing her anterior cruciate ligament during an off-season soccer game before her junior year in high school made her re-evaluate her athletic priorities.
“I always wanted to be at a really extreme level of competition,” she says. “Once I started wrestling, I saw what my potential was. I saw that maybe this was my green light; maybe it wasn’t soccer.”
‘A tenacity and a physicality’
Her father, Jamie Hubbard, a Buddhist studies professor at Smith College, said he never considered his daughter to be the best athlete among her peers.
“I always thought of Alicia as the 80 percenter, but with a tenacity and a physicality that made up for maybe not having the best move on the soccer ball, or whatever it was. She’d take you down. She has a physicality that’s intense,” he says.
And it was that physicality, combined with “a very hard work ethic,” that made Hubbard so well-suited to wrestling, says Byron Joy, who coached the sport at Northampton High her senior year.
“She would work harder in practice than some of the other guys on the team,” Joy says. “If you’re going to be a successful wrestler, you need to be able to take the whole experience in. And she was able to take everything as a learning experience.”
The only girl on the team in 2005, she “had the talent and the passion for the sport” to make up for her lack of familiarity with wrestling, says Joy.
Hubbard said she had to set aside concerns that male teammates might not take her seriously. “But I proved myself, and I think the boys respected that.”
Today, Hubbard wrestles women in competition who are mostly in their late 20s and early 30s. “I’m still very young. It’s intimidating, but it’s also inspiring,” she says.
Winning the Girls Massachusetts State Wrestling Tournament in March 2007 made her realize that “maybe it’s not so impossible to reach my goals.”
“It was my first tournament ever. It was my first gold medal ever. And that was my inspiration for saying, ‘I can do this. Look how far I’ve come,’” she says.
“The first time we went to see her first championship, I was surprised that the movements were even graceful,” recalls her mother, Maki Hubbard, a Japanese language professor at Smith College. “Of course there are rules and styles – and Alicia’s determined, vicious look – but also flow, timing, speed … It was exciting.”
Amber Wing is Hubbard’s practice partner at the All-Stars Wrestling Club. Wing says she is motivated to become better by working with someone so passionate about wrestling as Hubbard. “She’s the perfect partner. We spend a lot of time together, and we’re there to support one another.
“She goes hard all the time. She wants to go to the Olympics, so she puts a lot of time into (wrestling). Pretty much all the time she can, really,” Wing adds.
That has led Hubbard to compete as far away as Puerto Rico, Toronto and Las Vegas in the past year.
‘Best of two worlds’
Hubbard awakes at 6 a.m. each day to do cardio and weight-training workouts before heading to work. Between January and April, when she does most of her competitive wrestling, Hubbard also trains on the mat two or three times each day.
“They’re long days, but I get everything done,” she says. “It’s worth it in the end.”
Two hours before stepping onto the wrestling mat in Springfield earlier this month, Hubbard is wearing a pink dress, black flip-flops, and a long beaded necklace while massaging a client amidst facial cleansers, oils and various other beautifying products.
Hubbard graduated in January 2007 from the New England Center of Esthetic Education in Northampton and is now a licensed esthetician, working part time at Tranquility Day Spa in Florence.
She explains that “it’s the best of two worlds. It’s strange, but the two things that I love doing more than anything in my life are wrestling and esthetics. It’s a good balance.”
Her father, Jamie, says his daughter’s two major interests don’t surprise him in the slightest because “she likes unusual challenges.”
“I’ll make you beautiful, then I’ll beat you up,” he adds, laughing. “But it’s all about finding your bliss, and she seems to have discovered it.”
Still, Hubbard says she has to deal with finding financial support for the training she needs to wrestle at an advanced level, as well as overcoming persistent stereotypes about the sport.
“A lot of people think of huge, jacked women who are involved with men’s wrestling. That’s totally unrealistic,” she says. “It’s really upsetting because there’s so much great talent but it’s hard for girls to find training spaces and coaching.”
“I can’t say that when I was little I dreamt of the Olympics, because I didn’t,” Hubbard adds. “But now I can see it’s an attainable goal because there is that market for women’s wrestling. It’s also more confidence-boosting when you know that there’s an opportunity to be at the Olympic level.”
But for now, Hubbard is focused on her next challenge: the Sunkist Tournament in Arizona during October. It’s a chance, she says, to get noticed, secure a few sponsors and most importantly, get more experience.
“She’s grown a lot mentally and physically,” Nieves says. “And the key thing is we take it step by step. So far, so good.”
