Jenny Chu '07 gains athletic accolades as a freestyle wrestler.
A few years ago, when Haverford sophomore Jenny Chu and her twin sister Kimmy were still wrestling at the Germantown Friends School, they traveled to a sports workshop being put on at Penn State, and had a chance to talk to coach Ron Tirpak of the USA Wrestling Team, essentially the preliminary stage for American Olympic hopefuls: "They wanted to know about some technical moves — how to get out from a bottom position you don't want to get stuck in; how to turn into a pinning . . . What I liked was their intensity, their competitive spirit — not to say the great condition they were in for high school kids. You could see they both had a future in wrestling if they wanted it . . ."
As it turned out, Tirpak, formerly head wrestling coach at Swarthmore, now assistant coach at Ursinus College, went on to train both women, who were equally talented, though Kim was "more a pure power wrestler," while Jen blended "finesse with power — put it this way," Coach Tirpak chuckles: "Kim would just go through a wall; Jen would hit the wall, but then go around it." Both sisters finished seventh in their first national competitions, but sadly, Kim developed an injury that turned out to be congenital — though it was exacerbated by her take-no-prisoners style of wrestling. She's at Ithaca College now, but no longer competes.
Jen won a National Junior Championship in Freestyle competition in 2003, and placed 7th, along with Kim, in 2002. Those victories were all in Freestyle, too, the favored form for women wrestlers in North America (unlike Greco/Roman wrestling the style still favored in Europe, it allows holds on the legs as well as head, arms, and upper torso). At 5'2", 128 pounds, her first big victory was at Fargo, North Dakota, in 2002, the first year USA Wrestling opened its competitions to females. After two more wins in the Montreal and Toronto Opens (women's wrestling is far advanced in Canada), Jen earned the right to train at the prestigious Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado (where she's scheduled to head in mid-March during Spring Break with Tirpak). One of the problems for female wrestlers in the Haverford/Bryn Mawr/Swarthmore/University of Pennsylvania/Ursinus axis is a lack of formal teams — women's wrestling hereabouts is a matter of clubs, and wrestling, like any other sport, requires sweaty practices and financial support.
"So it would be nice, Coach Tirpak enunciates, "if all these women could practice together — which is possible, since women's wrestling is not an NCAA-sponsored sport.
"As it is, Jen says, I usually do two to three hours every Sunday at the Swarthmore gym . . . but it's like we're guests." Coach Tirpak would like to see daily workouts with only one or two days' rest, "but of course she's getting accustomed to college, and she has her academics and social life," he concedes, a little wistfully.
Wistful because Jen is a natural: "She's beaten Olympic team members — for discretion's sake we won't say who; she took Jessica Larrina, her teammate and workout partner, in 20 minutes — before losing to Pia Rosenkrantz, the three-time German Junior National Champion, by one point in overtime!" And later this year, she' ll compete in the U.S. National Championships in Las Vegas, where both men and women will be wrestling.
Both Jen and her coach attribute the growth in popularity in women's wrestling in the last 10 years (high school team members grew from 104 in 1990 to 2,474 in 2000, and now numbers are unofficially listed as around 5,000), to a general loosening of the ideas of what women should and shouldn't be doing, sportswise — "I mean I'm on the field hockey team here, too," she says. "I play forward." In high school, Jen competed in field events like the discus, shotput, and javelin. "But also, many schools are now offering more opportunities," Tirpak hints, broadly. "It's good for women to compete, right?" Jen laughs. "I mean, just for the challenge, isn't it?"
She's most interested in history and psychology at Haverford now, but isn't sure where those subjects will lead yet:
"Plenty of time," she says.
