Windsor’s Yulisa Medrano ready for CIF wrestling championships

WINDSOR

Yulisa Medrano’s college search has been trickier than most. The Windsor High School senior is looking for the intersection of her two passions. She wants to attend a university that offers both a nursing program and a women’s wrestling team.

Medrano’s long-term goal is to help heal the human body. Even if she has to bruise and batter a few of them along the way.

More immediately, Medrano is preparing for the CIF State Girls Wrestling Championships, which begin Friday in Visalia. She punched her ticket by winning the 143-pound division at the North Coast Section championships two weekends ago. Medrano was the only Redwood Empire girl to win a section title, and the first Windsor girl ever to do it.

It was a goal she’d harbored for a long time.

“We run a lot of sprints, and by the end of practice, all of the girls are tired,” Medrano said recently. “And all I could think of was just ‘state, state.’ I want to go out there and I want to make my team proud, and I want to represent myself, and my family, and my school especially. It just keeps me going. Even when I’m tired and exhausted, it keeps me going.”

Medrano has already advanced further than she ever thought possible. After her freshman year she decided she needed an extracurricular - a club or a sport or something.

“I chose wrestling because I wanted to find a sport that fit my personality,” Medrano said. “And it was either joining the football team or wrestling.”

There were three other girls wrestling at Windsor, so she skipped football.

Though Medrano felt poorly conditioned as a sophomore, she learned some moves and wound up placing seventh at NCS.

She was primed to break out in her junior year; instead, she was nearly broken. Medrano is a serious student, and she signed up for a full slate of AP classes as a junior. At the same time, she was having some problems at home. And then came the injuries - a sprained ankle, a hyperextended knee and, against the No. 2 seed at NCS, a sprained elbow.

Medrano took seventh at the section tournament again. For months afterward she would wake up crying from nightmares, reliving the pain and disappointment of those final matches.

Typically, Medrano decided to do something about it. She had always worked out, but last summer she switched to Energy Health Club and, after getting past the injuries, focused more on power lifting. As a junior, Medrano wrestled at 126 pounds. She showed up for senior workouts at around 150 pounds of lean muscle.

“I remember seeing her when she showed up this year, and I said, ‘What the hell happened to you?’?” recalled Scott Hayman, her Windsor wrestling coach.

Medrano had to do some wardrobe shopping. Her shoulders had gotten too big for her dresses.

On the mat, the added strength was a game changer.

“It was so much easier to push and pull girls, keeping them down and snapping them down,” Medrano said. “It kind of like shocked me. It made me realize, ‘Oh, this is how it feels to be on the other end.’ Because I would always get beat by my opponent. They would pound my head and stuff like that.”

Her power game is another weapon in what was already a solid arsenal. It starts with her mental toughness, but it doesn’t end there.

“She’s very aggressive. She doesn’t make mistakes,” said Hayman, who wrestled at El Molino. “And she’s willing to put herself in jeopardy. If she gets caught, she gets caught. And she’ll live with it.”

Medrano has been a beast all season. She takes a 29-3 record into the CIF event, and her three losses were to the No. 1-ranked girl and the No. 2-ranked girl (twice) in the state. She won the Folsom Tournament, moved up to 150 pounds for the Orange & Black Invitational at Santa Rosa High School and was named Outstanding Middleweight, and finished fourth at the prestigious Napa Valley Girls Classic.

The Windsor girls program has blossomed along with her. The team grew to 15 wrestlers this year, and the improved Jaguars beat Ukiah for the first time in 32 dual meets.

Medrano’s parents, both Mexican immigrants, were initially skeptical of her wrestling. Her wish to become a nurse is easier to grasp.

Yulisa’s father was paralyzed in an auto accident before she was born, and is confined to a wheelchair. He has struggled through serious medical issues for years. Trips to the doctor have long been part of the family’s rhythm of life.

Starting around eighth grade, Yulisa would tag along on appointments and translate when needed. The girl wound up spending hours and hours in hospitals, dutifully doing her homework in waiting rooms. A cousin who worked at the hospital as a surgical assistant would occasionally show her around the facility. And over time Medrano began to familiarize herself with medicines and instruments and medical terms. It intrigued her.

Of all the staff members Medrano observed, it was the nurses who impressed her most.

“How caring they were,” she explained. “They’d be working late at night, and they would still come in and they would have a smile on their face and would greet my dad. I think I kind of fell in love with that kind of care they projected toward my dad, and I wanted to do that for others.”

For her senior project, Medrano shadowed in the obstetrics department at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, assisting in natural births and cesarean sections. And yes, she did indeed find schools that feature both nursing and wrestling. She has been accepted to two of them - the University of Jamestown in North Dakota and Midland University in Nebraska - and both have offered significant scholarship money.

So Medrano is more or less playing with house money as she prepares for the state championships. She’ll leave for Visalia on Thursday with a couple family members and with Andrea Rocha, her closest Windsor teammate.

Medrano will be easy to spot at the huge tournament. She’ll be wearing a new gold singlet with her name printed across the back. Hayman had promised it to her if she made state.

Medrano will be facing the best of the best in California, but Hayman thinks she has a good chance of making it to the second day of wrestling.

“She’s very strong-willed,” the coach said. “And that’s her biggest attribute on the mat, is she’s not gonna take no for an answer.”

You can reach staff writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.