There was a lot going on when Maddie Ripley won the 106-pound division at the Class B wrestling championships last week, becoming the first Maine girl to win a state title in that sport.

Just as with every other champion there that day, Ripley’s victory was the fulfillment of a dream, and a reward for everything she had to do to get there.

She won for herself, and for all the hard work she had put in over the years. She won for her coaches and her family – one and the same, in her case – and all they had taught her and sacrificed so that she could spend countless hours on the mat and in the gym.

Finally, whether she knew it or not, Ripley won for Lisa Nowak and the other schoolgirl wrestlers who paved the way for her.

In 1995, while a freshman at Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham, Nowak became the first girl in Maine to challenge a rule that kept female wrestlers from competing.

At the time, boys could refuse to wrestle girls, forcing the girl’s team to either replace her with a male wrestler or forfeit the match. There was a real reluctance on the part of many in the wrestling community to accept female wrestlers – Cony’s coach at the time said girls would have to wrestle with a “stuffed dummy … because they’re not going to wrestle with one of my guys” – and Nowak only got to compete in three matches that year.

Nowak filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission, and in 1996, the agency overturned the rule, becoming the 20th state to approve co-ed wrestling.

Now, opposing coaches and players couldn’t keep her off the mat. But that didn’t mean they all accepted her.

“People would throw things at me, say hurtful things, I received nasty letters, a nasty editorial was written, it was tough,” Nowak told the Brunswick Times Record in 2017, when she was inducted into the New England Women’s Wrestling Hall of Fame. “I felt the eyes on me. But there were some teams and wrestlers who were great. The Caribou team was great, while others shook my hand and said they respected me. But others were awful.”

It would take time. But eventually those that disagreed with the rule change – the ones who swore that updating what the Kennebec Journal at the time called a “relic of outdated athletic sexism” would ruin the sport – would be proved wrong.

Quickly after the ruling, more girls joined wrestling teams. Over the years, they’ve become part of the sport. Before Ripley, four girls won regional titles, and Ripley was just one of 48 girls who competed last week at the state girls’ wrestling championship, where she won the 107-pound division.

Ripley’s championship victory is already inspiring others.

“It’s really cool to see girls standing on that higher level now,” Hannah Perro, a freshman wrestler at Noble High, told the Press Herald following the girls’ championship. “I feel like boys look down on (girl wrestlers) and that just proves girls are able to do the same thing.”

Now that Ripley has stood on the medal stand, other girls wrestlers know they can, too.

They should also know that Lisa Nowak is the reason they can get on the mat at all.

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