Santa Cruz County wrestler Dominique Parrish hopes to take world by storm
On the East Coast, they’re bracing for the rain and flooding of tropical storm Gabby. Meanwhile, Team USA wrestler Helen Maroulis last week put the media on high alert about a different kind of storm about to hit Paris.
PARIS — On the East Coast, they’re bracing for the rain and flooding of tropical storm Gabby. Meanwhile, Team USA wrestler Helen Maroulis last week put the media on high alert about a different kind of storm about to hit Paris.
Call it tempest Dominique Parrish.
Seven years after the former Scotts Valley High athlete watched Maroulis win the United States’ first Olympic gold in women’s wrestling, and three years after she served as a noncompeting training partner for Maroulis’ bronze-medal effort in Tokyo, Parrish finally gets her turn on the mat. She will compete in early rounds of the 53 kilogram weight division Wednesday with finals scheduled for Thursday, all at the base of the Eiffel Tower.
According to Maroulis, Parrish’s opponents should batten down the hatches.
“As an athlete, man,” Maroulis said, “she’s like a tornado.”
Parrish would prefer Maroulis not sound the alarm over her arrival on the Olympic stage. She’s not ranked entering the event and only No. 26 in her weight class in the World Wrestling rankings. And she likes it that way.
Parrish suspects part of the reason she won gold at the 2022 World Wrestling Championships in Belgrade, Serbia, was because few other wrestlers had notes on her. She hadn’t wrestled much internationally and online video footage of her matches was sparse. That wasn’t the case a year later, when she fell out in the qualifying rounds.
“It was a bit of a shock for me when people had prepared to wrestle me. So that didn’t work out,” Parrish, 28, said. “But I think that’s like any athlete in any sport: You’ve got to diversify and keep perfecting the things that work and start working on some new stuff to catch people by surprise.”
Yet it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Parrish, and the American women in general, to stay off their opponents’ radar.
Maroulis, 32, broke a seal for the Americans in 2016 with her win at 53kg. Parrish and Maroulis both wrestled for Simon Fraser University and Parrish said she remembers exactly where she was during that historic performance.
“I remember watching her compete in the Olympic finals on my computer in the study hall, and I remember watching her win,” Parrish said. “It felt like it’s a big moment for everyone, in wrestling and in women’s sports in general.”
That breakthrough appears to have opened the floodgates for Team USA. When women’s wrestling became an Olympic discipline in 2004, the U.S. brought home two medals. Then, over the next dozen years, it collected one per Olympics. However, four American women returned with hardware from Tokyo, including a gold won by light-heavyweight Tamyra Mensah-Stock. And two days into competition in Paris, the team already has one medal on lockdown after 20-year-old Amit Elor reached Wednesday’s final in the 68kg weight class.
For the time being, though, Japan remains the powerhouse in women’s wrestling. A Japanese athlete ranks among the top three in six of World Wrestling’s eight women’s weight categories. At the Tokyo Olympics, they won four of the six gold medals.
So, Parrish has a tough test ahead of her in her first Olympic match against Japan’s Akari Fujinami. The No. 3 seed, Fujinami is a two-time world champion (2021 and 2023) at 53kg. If Parrish prevails, she’ll next get the winner of the match between No. 6 seed Christianah Ogunsanya of Nigeria and Khulan Batkhuyag of Mongolia. Batkhuyag was a 2022 world silver medalist.
One theory tossed around about why the U.S. has just begun to gain ground in the sport is that historically women have been discouraged from wrestling.
Maroulis said she fell for wrestling at age 7. One year in, though, her parents told her she had to quit. It wasn’t an Olympic sport, they pointed out, and “there was no future in it.” Later that summer they had to eat their words as the International Olympic Committee announced its inclusion in the Athens Olympic program.
“From there, I decided that my dream was to go to the Olympics, because that was what afforded me the opportunity to do what I love,” said Maroulis, who expects Paris to be her last Summer Games. “So pursuing the sport for me is just getting to do what I love every day.”
Parrish, meanwhile, wanted nothing to do with the sport even though her father was a coach and former competitor. What turned her off, she said, was seeing her older sister get pinned. Nope, she thought, not for me.
One day when she was in sixth grade, though, her friends signed her up for a wrestling camp as a prank. Parrish felt like she had to go since the teacher putting it on had her email and phone number. The rest is history.
One of the aspects Parrish said she really enjoyed about her team, though, was that it had so many girls on it. California has had a state girls wrestling tournament and the Falcons weren’t hesitant to bring girls into their fold. Parrish remembers competing at tournaments with 500 other females and at the state tournament — which she won twice — but also against boys at area tournaments.
“That female camaraderie in the sport, especially in an individual sport like wrestling, is really valuable,” Parrish said. “And it just teaches you to be a good person. You’re around people who have the same goals as you, and I feel like that rubs off on each other.”
Now Parrish has that with a group of Team USA women who also share a common goal: bring home a medal, inspire the next generation of women wrestlers and, of course, take the world by storm.