A month after wrapping up her high school wrestling career at the Tacoma Dome, Trinity Tafoya found herself on a different mat, just about six hours from home.
The Tenino senior had been in contact with the women’s wrestling program at NAIA Eastern Oregon University the past two seasons; the Mountaineers had sent staff up to Tacoma to watch her at Mat Classic XXXIV. For one last recruiting test, EOU coach Mhar Caballa asked her to come on a visit to La Grande — a visit that included getting on the mat with a few college-level wrestlers who had just returned from helping the Mountaineers earn 12th place as a team at the NAIA national championships in North Dakota.
“I was very nervous,” Tafoya said. “But it was fun.”
Tafoya hadn’t even gotten all the way back to Thurston County before Caballa called again, offering her a scholarship.
The senior, who was also weighing a track and field future as a thrower, didn’t take long to make up her mind.
“It was actually fairly simple,” Tafoya said. “I decided that I like the challenge that comes with wrestling, and the mindset that it comes with. So I decided to go with wrestling.”
When Tafoya put pen to paper to sign with Eastern Oregon last Monday, she became Tenino’s first female wrestler to commit to wrestle at the next level. It’s a big step for a program still relatively new to the scene; Tafoya took up the sport in middle school, around the time that Tenino High School first debuted its girls wrestling team.
Now, after a career that culminated with a third-place finish in the Girls 1B/2B/1A/2A 190-pound division at State last month, she gets to be program’s biggest success story to date, as a role model for an ever-growing girls wrestling community in Stone City.
“It makes me happy to think that others would look up to me, because in other sports, I looked up to the group of girls above me — in soccer, the group of girls above me last year in wrestling,” she said. “ I just hope to be able to pass that down.”
In the next few months, Tafoya will get ready to jump to the collegiate ranks — a move that includes a switch in form from the folkstyle wrestling the WIAA sanctions to the freestyle of college. Then, it’ll be time to move to La Grande, a town of 13,000 nestled between Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests that Tafoya described as at least a little like Tenino, and collegiate competition.
“It’s exciting,” Tafoya said. “I’m nervous, but I can’t wait to see what this brings.”
