Girls hit the mats: while more girls are taking up wrestling, in many high schools they must practice with--and compete against--boys.

• Author: Lewin, Tamar
• Position: SPORTS

Jessica Bennett, a sophomore at Montville High School in Oakdale, Conn., is the only girl on her school's wrestling team. But that hasn't stopped the 103-pound wrestler from winning 27 of her 42 matches this season.

Wrestling has helped build her confidence, she says, challenging both her body and her mind.

Gifts like Bennett are slowly moving into the mainstream. Nationwide, about 5,000 high school gifts wrestled last year (compared with 250,000 boys)--nearly five times as many as a decade ago.

But in many schools, gifts who want to wrestle must practice with, and compete against, boys.

It's a Catch-22 situation: Without enough girls, there can't be gifts' teams, and without gifts' teams, wrestling can't attract that many gifts.

The legal status of coed wrestling is not entirely clear, but in a few scattered cases, courts have ruled that if there is no gifts' team for them, gifts should be able to join boys' teams. Some athletic directors, however, have found ways to prevent girls from joining their teams.

FORFEITS

Critics say that for boys, coed wrestling is disconcerting. "If he beats her, he was supposed to," says Roger Shaw, women's director for USA Wrestling Connecticut. "And if he doesn't, he's dead meat."

Occasionally, boys forfeit rather than wrestle a girl, as...