Fox Chapel’s Jordana Matamoros to put her improvement on display

By: HSSN Staff
Tuesday, January 15, 2019 | 6:51 PM

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As much as Jordana Matamoros enjoyed wrestling in junior high, she didn’t plan to continue with the sport once she came to high school.

Then Fox Chapel coach Ron Frank began pestering her.

“I was in ceramics class and he was the jewelry teacher, so he came to my class every single day asking me to wrestle,” Matamoros said. “(He was) coming over, bothering me, asking me when I was going to turn in my physical. … He was very persistent.”

Eventually Frank’s hectoring wore Matamoros down, as she joined the team midway through her freshman year — “I think I was just like, I can’t do this for all four years of high school,” she said — and hasn’t looked back since.

Now a senior, Matamoros holds down the 106-pound spot in Fox Chapel’s starting lineup and is having the best season of her high school career. She has a 9-4 record with six pins, and last month earned a seventh-place medal at the Steve DeAugustino Holiday Classic at West Mifflin.

“I’m definitely wrestling the best I’ve wrestled; I just think there’s a lot of improvement (left),” Matamoros said. “I see a lot. The people that I’ve wrestled, I feel I have to take it up another level if I want to do as well as I want to do this year.”

Matamoros has a long history of combat sports dating back to fifth grade, when she took up jiu-jitsu after her father began classes.

“That was just my personality, so I just enjoyed it,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it at first, but once I did I just liked it and kept doing it.

“I played soccer at the time, but I didn’t really like it. I didn’t really like any other sports. That was the one thing that I liked a lot.”

Matamoros has an orange belt in jiu-jitsu, though she no longer competes. She also trains in boxing and wants to compete in that sometime in the near future.

After the daughter of a family friend joined Fox Chapel’s junior high wrestling program when Matamoros was in eighth grade, she took up the sport herself. But although she liked it, she wasn’t sure about continuing it in high school given the step up in competition.

A dislocated elbow that Matamoros suffered at a jiu-jitsu camp during the summer between eighth and ninth grade, an injury that eventually required two surgeries, also gave her pause about wrestling.

But Frank wouldn’t take no for an answer, even if the elbow injury prevented her from wrestling as a freshman. Matamoros eventually joined the team in January of that year and became a starter as a sophomore.

“(I) made sure that she knew that we wanted her on the team,” said Frank, who’s coached three female wrestlers in his nearly 40 years at Fox Chapel. “We don’t treat her any different than anyone else on the team, except that she dresses in a different locker room.

“It’s kind of funny — people will say you have a girl on the team, and I’ll say no, we have a 106-pound wrestler on the team. They all do 10 pull-ups after practice, and she’s got to do it. They’re all running laps, and she’s got to do it. She’s just an athlete on the team.”

Likewise, wrestling boys was nothing new for Matamoros, who competed against them in jiu-jitsu.

“I understand if boys don’t want to wrestle me,” she said. “I understand it’s uncomfortable. But I just hope that they just want to beat me. That’s it. That’s all you need to wrestle a match. So it’s not that they should have to be accepting of me in the sport and want me there — that’s OK if they don’t — but I just want them to go out there and wrestle.”

Although Matamoros doesn’t possess the pure strength of some of her opponents, she has other edges. For one, as a senior, she generally has the advantage of experience over the freshmen and sophomores who generally populate the 106-pound weight class.

Matamoros also works with Fox Chapel assistant Michael Frank on using her legs in wrestling — which especially helps because her previous elbow injury limits her in certain positions on the mat.

“She’s lanky,” Ron Frank said. “She’s not that tall, but her frame is long. … Her strength is not great, but her knowledge and her knowledge of leverage, how to use what she has, is very experienced now.”

With every successful match, Matamoros is gaining confidence, and she’s hoping to earn a medal at this week’s Allegheny County tournament, which Fox Chapel is hosting Friday and Saturday.

The once-reluctant wrestler doesn’t know what her future holds with the sport, but she’s glad she committed to it.

“I love wrestling,” she said. “I love all the sports like wrestling. I box, I do jiu-jitsu. I love it.”

Doug Gulasy is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Doug at dgulasy@tribweb.com or via Twitter @dgulasy_Trib.

Tags: Fox Chapel