Zareen Syed | Chicago Tribune
It’s clear that wrestler Emma Engels doesn’t do it “for the ‘gram,” and certainly not for the attention.
The 15-year-old sophomore from Bartlett High School is fresh off an Illinois High School Association wrestling championship victory, but you likely wouldn’t guess that based on how quickly she shoves her gold medal back into her backpack. She’s just not the type to brag about her victories on outlets such as Instagram.
“Next year, it won’t matter,” said Engels, of Elgin. “And I go play softball now, and they’ll make an announcement about it, but the girls across the (softball) field aren’t going to care that I won the championship in wrestling.”
On Feb. 25, Engels won the 100-pound championship match of the girls wrestling state meet in Bloomington, becoming only the fourth state champ in Bartlett High School history.
Previous state champions include a female bowler, a student journalist and a male wrestler 11 years before Engels joined the ranks.
During the high school wrestling season, however, Engels mostly competes against boys, having wrestled girls only a few times.
“I just see them as another opponent across the way. I definitely hear, after I win, (boys saying to her opponent) ‘Oh, you’re wrestling a girl and you lost!’ Things like that,” Engels said. “I don’t really care. If I win, I win.”
IHSA allows competition between male and female athletes in wrestling, but students have to choose which gender to compete against at the end of the year going into the state series, where Engels chose to compete in the girls’ championship.
From the looks of it, Engels is a shy, unassuming teenager in the throes of high school athletics and STEM Academy classes. She’s kind to classmates and teachers alike.
“You’d wonder like, ‘She’s the state champ?’ but she’ll beat up kids in the wrestling room,” said Bartlett High School’s wrestling head coach, John Glorioso. “She’s a competitor — nice, humble, respectful, does what she has to do. And when you watch her, it’s like, ‘Holy crap — this is the nice girl that’s in class?’”
During the regular season, Glorioso said, coaches generally determine which opponents will better prepare their wrestlers for higher-level competition. Engels, who competes in the 106-pound varsity division, often has to go against a male wrestler at the same level because there aren’t enough female wrestlers in her weight class.
Dawn Engels, Emma’s mom, said her daughter wrestling against the guys and beating them comes as no surprise.
“If she wants to do it, she’s going to do it,” Dawn Engels said. “It’s never been about competing against a boy or a girl for Emma; it’s been about competing against another athlete.”
Unfazed by her shiny medal and soon-to-be banner in the wrestling room, Emma Engels is already thinking about next season.
“I definitely just want to get back there. I guess next time, a better record,” she said. Her record this season was 35 wins and 12 losses.
Only one of those 12 losses was to a female wrestler, whom Engels ended up beating on Feb. 25 to win the state title.
“I knew in the first match, I could have beat her,” Engels said. “I was winning and then I got pinned in the third period, but I knew I could beat her and I knew what I had to do differently.”
Engels said most of her friends are busy playing high school sports, which leaves little time for after-school hangouts, and when she’s not practicing in the wrestling room, she helps coach the Scorpion Wrestling Club, a program for elementary and middle schoolers, including her younger brother, Cameron.
Seven years ago, Engels decided to jump into the club herself after “getting tired of sitting in the stands” to watch her brother compete. Cameron, who’s in eighth grade and plans on trying out for the Bartlett High School wrestling team next school year, has been Engels’ built-in teammate and competition since they were children, Engels’ mom said.
Matt Pancamo, Bartlett’s girls wrestling coach and the faculty sponsor of the Scorpion club, said Engels’ humility is reflective of the Bartlett High School wrestling community.
Pancamo said wrestlers are encouraged not to boast or brag about victories, but instead celebrate the journey and progress it takes to win.
“She’s exactly what a coach wants in an athlete,” he said. “She speaks her mind when she doesn’t like something and she’s very smart and calculated.”
A fun, yet not-so-hidden-anymore fact about Engels (which she giddily reveals), is that she was the high school mascot for the 2022-23 football season.
While in the hawk suit, she said she tapped into her extroverted side more freely.
“There was an announcement about finding someone to be the mascot and my friends were like, ‘You should do it!” Engels said with a laugh. “So I went down there and (the athletic director) was like, ‘Yeah you should do it,’ and so I did it.”
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