Mountain View’s Kaley Barker. More photos from the first day of state wrestling. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)
DENVER — Kaley Barker became the seventh female to compete at Colorado’s state wrestling tournament on Thursday evening.
Yet the enormity of joining such rare company seemed like a bigger deal to everyone else but Barker, a sophomore at Mountain View.
“I don’t necessarily give myself any props for being a girl and being here,” she said with a humble shrug in the tunnels underneath the Pepsi Center concourse. “I’m here like everyone else trying to meet my goals.”
Barker lost her first match in the Class 4A 106-pound bracket on Thursday, a 15-1 major decision to Greeley Central’s Ben Euresti. She now moves to the consolation bracket, which begins Friday afternoon.
Thursday’s appearance marked Barker’s first at the tournament. She finished sixth at the regional round a season ago, narrowly missing out on a berth.
“It was an awful feeling knowing that if I would’ve won one more match, I would’ve been here last year,” Barker season. “So I was like, ‘I can’t go down again, I have to do this, and I have to meet my goal to get to state.'”
Barker, right, congratulates her opponent, Ben Euresti of Greeley Central after their match. More photos. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)
Barker did just that, finishing third at 4A’s Region 3 last weekend. It punched her ticket to this season’s tournament.
Barker did attend last year’s event — as a fan supporting her twin brother, Braden — “but I wasn’t on the mat,” she said. (Braden qualified again this season at 170 pounds, and won his first match.)
So there was some adjustment to the first time out on Thursday.
“I feel some of the tournaments we were at earlier in the season and even through club are bigger than this, but it’s not the level we’ve been wrestling at,” Barker said. “I had to get used to that.
“The first match, obviously, didn’t go as I planned,” she added. “There’s always (Friday) and Saturday.”
With Barker qualifying this season, it continued a streak of having at least one female participant at the tournament since 2009. Included in that group are Denver East’s Maya Nelson, who qualified that past two seasons, and Grand Valley’s Cody Pfau, a three-time qualifier.
“It’s really cool to know that I’m not the only one that’s been here,” Barker said.
And though she doesn’t want to make a big deal out of the fact the she’s the seventh female qualifier, Barker does recognize the impact her appearance here will likely have on younger girls.
“It’s always great to inspire little girls,” she said. “They obviously know that this is not a full girls sport. You don’t have to be a guy to be successful at this sport, obviously. There’s been successful girls all around the world. We’ve proven it.”