South Bay Students Petition for a High School Wrestling Team

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- A number of student athletes and their supporters are promoting an online petition asking that Mountain View High School launch a wrestling program.

The students, who wrestled in middle school, are now facing the end of their amateur wrestling careers at Mountain View High if the school doesn't add a program. Every year, about 30-50 wrestlers finish Middle School from the Blach and Graham schools' wrestling programs, and are then left without any options to continue with the sport in high school.

Now, the parent of one student is leading a petition to the Mountain View High School principal to start a wrestling program and address this inequality between the only two high schools in the school district. Los Altos High offers wrestling, while Mountain View does not.

On January 12, a meeting is planned at Blach Middle School with the principals of Mountain View and Los Altos High School, as well as the superintendent of the Mountain View Los Altos High School District to welcome the 8th graders to high school. At that meeting, the students plan to address this inequality with the administrators at that time with the backing of all the supporters who signed the petition.

The supporters say they plan to ask to the administrators to have an open dialogue about what it would take to start the program, and not begin the conversation with why it can't be done.

"I feel like the biggest roadblock is the will of the administrators to give the Mountain View students equal opportunity as their peers in Los Altos," said Nhiem Nguyen, the parent of one student-athlete who's transferring to Mountain View High. "It’s really disheartening to see the kids be introduced to this sport for two years and purely because of where they live, their wrestling experience ends at the start of high school. We can, and we must do better than that. Wrestling deserves a chance at Mountain View. The kids deserve a chance.”

The petition can be seen and signed online at https://www.change.org/p/start...

Image courtesy change.org