Photo- Courtesy Milan High School
Kayla Roell is all the talk of a lot of folks these days. The IHSAA sanction of girls’ wrestling as an official sport this school year has played right into her wheelhouse. Kayla captured 4th place in the state’s initial girls’ wrestling tournament last weekend, in the 115-pound division. She visited WRBI’s Coaches’ Corner show Monday evening, along with Indians wrestling Coach Adrian Wilburn. Kayla tells us she started wrestling around age 7, and has simply enjoyed it and stuck with it, to gain her current success. She says yes, it’s a physical sport, but the right mentality for wrestling is key. She credits numerous male teammates at Milan for their contributions to her success in high school, but says things weren’t quite that way back in middle school. As she became a freshman, however, she was able to start traveling with the team, and truly enjoying herself in the sport, making her earliest high school memories. She says her dad and younger brother were wrestlers, so she wanted to try, and really took to the sport. She’s not shy in declaring her goal, to win a state wrestling championship by her senior, if not her junior, year in high school. Coach Wilburn points out that Kayla works as hard as anyone at any given moment, and is simply a “go, go go” type of person. And does she go!! When not on the mat, Kayla also races sprint cars on dirt tracks, hitting speeds well over 100 MPH, behind engines that pack as much as 900 horsepower.