Austin family defends girls wrestling

AUSTIN (KXAN) - A decade ago, Robert and Debra Woodruff were busy raising four daughters when Ashley, their eldest startled the whole family with an announcement.

"She came home and said she was going to start wrestling and I said, 'No you're not,'" said Ashley's mother, Debra Woodruff. "I said, 'That's not acceptable because girls don't wrestle!'"

Ashley, though, was ready to fight, not only on the girls' team at LBJ High School , but with her parents' opposition to the wrestling idea.

"Ashley is our daughter who likes to push things to the edge," Debra said, "and she said, 'Oh, I will!' So Robert and I talked about it and said, 'Well, we'll let her try one match.'"

It's not that the Woodruff girls were not already active. Ballet, for example, was a big part of family life and the girls' grandmother was horrified that dance might take a back seat to rolling around on a floor.

"Instead of calling it ballet, my mom used to call it, 'tippy-toe,'" Debra Woodruff said. "She'd say, 'Those girls need to stop that sport and do their tippy-toes!'"

But Ashley's first match led to another and then another, and her parents started noticing a change in the girl.

"Ashley started focusing more on school and staying home so she could be ready for her matches," her mother said. "She quit going out late, so we said, 'This is pretty good.' It helped her focus and that's what we've seen with all the girls. It helps them set goals and achieve them."

All the girls? That's right, all the girls. Ashley's little sister Rachel followed her onto the mat.

"Pretty early on I started winning a whole bunch and getting first in a lot of the tournaments I went to," said Rachel. "So then I was like, 'I like this; I like winning.'"

After Rachel, third sister Elise took her turn on the LBJ girls' team and she was followed by the youngest of the kids, Allison.

"Being dominated by somebody is one of the worst feelings for me to have," said Allison. "But being the one dominating the other person, controlling everything, winning, having your hand raised, knowing that it was all on you to win that match, it's one of the best feelings to have."

Here's the thing, though: For Allison and each of her big sisters, the domination factor is not an end in itself; it's a road that leads to a land of self-sufficiency.

"It's you who wins or loses; it's not a team," Allison stressed. "You can't put the blame on anybody else; it's all on you."

That does not mean, though, that the girls had no help. For one thing, they supported each other.

"Of course, when we were younger, I just remember fighting all the time over who's going to have the remote or what movie we're going to watch," Said Rachel. "But now we're a lot closer and wrestling definitely did help that. We can relate to having to cut weight and going to practices and tournaments and then your body just hurts sometimes. So we can all definitely relate a lot with that."

Then there was Mom and Dad, the same mom and dad who at one time had been so down on the whole wrestling notion. They jumped right onto the proverbial mat themselves, chauffeuring the kids from practice to practice, from tournament to tournament. They learned the moves and techniques and shouted them out loud from the crowd as the girls competed.

"I like it," Allison said. "I know they're out there supporting me and it feels good to have that support that not everybody has; their parents aren't always there. It makes me more confident and stronger, knowing that they're there behind me, supporting me 100 per cent."

There was a problem though. That energetic and vocal support spawned the great and terrible beast, known to the family as "Hubba-hubba."

Father Robert begins the story: "There is a movie called Heaven Knows Mr. Allison . It had Robert Mitchum, one of my favorite actors, and Deborah Kerr. Whenever a bad event in the movie was turning into a good event, Robert Mitchum, the Marine, would go, 'Hubba, hubba!' And I've always liked that phrase, as a little kid. So in the matches, when the girls were about to win, my daughter or one of the girls on the team, I'd go, 'Hubba, hubba!'"

"He always did it when I was wrestling or one of my other female teammates was wrestling, and I was like, 'You know, it just sounds wrong for him to be yelling, "Hubba, hubba," when these two girls are wrestling,'" said Rachel.

Robert, though, was clueless.

"I thought it was just fine; I had no idea," he said.

But after some three years of hubba-hubba-ing, Dad finally got the "idea."

"I know he didn't mean it to seem inappropriate or anything, but I felt that it was," Rachel insisted. "So in my junior year, I finally had enough. I had just gotten first at this tournament and I should have been happy, but I just came off the mat and said, 'Dad, you need to stop saying, 'Hubba, hubba!' It's so embarrassing and it just sounds so wrong when other girls are wrestling and you're screaming this!'"

Her father has a similar recollection.

"Rachel had won; she came