Emily: Hey Talon Marks, this is Emily Maciel, the Co-Sports and Co-Social Media Editor. Today I’m here with Christina Osorio, who has just become Downey High School’s first ever girl state champion. We’ll get to that soon, because we’re gonna start with where it all started. So Christina, how and when did you get into wrestling?

Christina: Um, I got into wrestling when I was about five or six years old. My dad and my brother wrestled, so it just kind of went passed down to me a little bit.

Emily: Do you think that they play like a huge role into like who you are today?

Christina: Um yeah, I think they do play a huge role. They’ve been my coaches and mentors.

Emily: So now getting into what everybody wants to hear about, going into CIF and Masters and State, were you aware that no girl has ever become a state champ at Downey?

Christina: Yeah, I was aware. I’ve been looking at the board every day that says all the State placers and it really just made me push harder to be a State champ.

Emily: How did that fuel you and like what was going through your head during like the championship match at State?

Christina: It was just proving people wrong, because I was the number four seed and I wanted to show them that I wasn’t number four. And it was just also help- not helping. It was also just like, making people that believed in me proud and making it worth their time.

Emily: What do you think was the toughest match whether that be at State, Masters, CIF?

Christina: I think my toughest match was the finals match just because there’s a different setting. It wasn’t just a bunch of mats, it was just one mat with me and my opponent.

Emily: So you’ve been wrestling for a long time now, have you ever been through any challenges like either mentally or physically?

Christina: Yeah, I’ve been through mental and physical challenges. Mentally just me not believing that I could do the things I was able to do and I wasn’t putting enough trust in myself and I wasn’t trusting the people around me telling me that I could do it. I was just thinking that they were saying that just to say that and it paid off in the end.

Emily: Over the years women’s and girls wrestling has been growing tremendously, what have been the biggest changes that you’ve seen or that you’ve gone through yourself?

Christina: The biggest changes is just there’s so many girls now and they’re just getting tougher and tougher. It’s not just girls wrestling, it’s-it’s really just a really tough thing.

Emily: As a senior at Downey High you’re getting ready to graduate and we know your brother wrestled here at Cerritos. Can the Falcons expect to see you wrestle for them in the future? Or do you have other schools in mind?

Christina: I think I have other plans. I think I want to go straight to a four year. I don’t know exactly which one but I know that I probably want to go a little bit farther and a little bit bigger.

Emily: Is there anything else that you want to say or add you know, that I didn’t ask about?

Christina: I just want to say thanks to my coaches and my family and friends because they believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. And they helped me out the whole time, even when I wasn’t practicing good or wrestling good at tournaments, or when I lost and when I won. They were just always there with the same good energy.