Lynbrook female grappler makes history with wrestling tournament win

The crowd gathered at Southside High School in Rockville Centre erupted last Saturday night as Ally Fitzgerald made history with a single pin. The Lynbrook High School freshman became the first female to win a weight class title at a sanctioned wrestling tournament on Long Island.

“The whole gym went crazy,” Ally said of the reaction to her victory, “and I really didn’t expect that much support, considering I’m a girl.”

Lynbrook coach Richie Renz said the atmosphere was electric. “It was unbelievable,” he said. “The roar of the crowd, the eruption was so unbelievable. You couldn’t hear anything. If that gym was filled to capacity, the building would have come down.”

Ally, 14, went 4-0 on the night in the 99-pound weight class — with all of her matches against boys — and earned the Most Outstanding Wrestler Award in a unanimous vote by the coaches. She was instrumental in Lynbrook’s placing first of 14 teams in the Frank Giampiolo Cyclones tournament. It was the Owls’ first tournament win in 18 years.

After knocking off her first three opponents, Ally used a cradle to pin her final adversary, from Farmingdale, to earn first place in her weight class. The historic moment came at the 3:11 mark of the second period.

“People don’t understand the magnitude of this,” said Hilary Becker, who coached Ally when she was part of the Lynbrook Titans youth wrestling program. “We have a girl competing at the varsity level.”

Ally won her opening match of the tournament by pinning her opponent in 40 seconds. She avenged her only loss of the season against a Long Beach wrestler by defeating him, 7-0, in the quarterfinals, and then won her semifinal match by pin in 1:51.

Her road to success began when she was a victim of bullying in first grade and her parents, Peter and Rebecca Fitzgerald, signed her up for jujitsu classes to build her confidence. She joined the Titans at age 9 after watching her younger brother, Liam, compete, and then made the Lynbrook South Middle School team. In her final two seasons at LSMS, she went 11-0, winning nine of her matches by pin.

Rebecca said that watching her daughter win on Saturday was a dream come true. “All we could think about was [how] all her hard work, sacrifice and dedication to a sport that is predominantly male had truly paid off when they raised her hand as the winner,” she said. “All my daughter’s supporters were going wild, and I knew that everyone in that gym knew what an amazing wrestler my daughter is.”

Renz said that Ally’s championship match was happening at the same time that his son, Matthew, a team captain, was wrestling in the finals of the 285-pound weight class on an adjacent mat. Matthew Renz defeated his opponent to finish first for the third consecutive tournament and joined Ally as Lynbrook’s only other individual first-place finisher.

Though Ally is the only girl on the team, she has fit in well with her teammates, and has not faced any adversity because of her gender, Richie Renz noted. “She’s very polite, very respectful, and it’s a lot of fun,” he said. “The team has embraced her, and they work together to help her.”

Renz praised Ally for her offseason training, and said that she is in top condition. She spends hours in wrestling rooms training for matches and tournaments, and also works on her jujitsu technique. She plans to work out with the U.S. Women’s Cadet National Team, and hopes to compete at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Ally turned heads as an eighth-grader, when she set a Lynbrook school record by knocking out 110 push-ups, breaking the previous mark of 108 set by All-Conference wrestler Anthony Salamone a few years earlier.

On Saturday, all of her hard work culminated in a history-making performance, which she said she hoped would help put female wrestlers on the map.

“This win really opens up the door for other girls, and hopefully I inspired other females to not be afraid to wrestle boys,” Ally said. “New York has almost 500 girls certified this year at the varsity level. Hopefully those numbers increase throughout my high school career, and it leads to eventually getting girls’ high school wrestling sanctioned.”