To him, it's no big deal. It's not a huge hurdle any more. Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer Hordagoda, left, gets temporarily pinned by an opponent from Wilcox High School during a wrestling match earlier this season. She was the only female wrestler competing that evening between the two high schools. Soto admits that some people do make a fuss when they see Hordagoda on the mat.
Opponents get nervous because they're afraid of losing to a girl.
The crowd worries that she'll get hurt. Even her teammates were wary at first, he says. Hordagoda says she confronted a lot of hostility when she first decided to wrestle. I thought that was crazy. When she tried to wrestle in eighth grade, there was another girl on the team.