It has never been easy for Ashlee Sherman to recruit athletes into the cramped and muggy second-floor wrestling room at Oakland Technical High School. He tried back in 1972 with a kid who was known for outracing track athletes in tennis shoes. Rickey Henderson told the coach he had baseball practice instead.
That one checks out. Just look at the MLB record book. Others have left Sherman shaking his head. “Soccer practice, baseball practice, basketball practice,” the 79-year-old says, remembering the excuses that have piled up over his 54 years at Tech. “Basketball? You’re 5-2!
“A lot of kids don’t want to do the work,” laments Sherman, who likes to send his wrestlers running up Broadway Terrace, past Claremont Country Club, through the hills to Lake Temescal each day after school. “It’s hard when you have practice and you see your friends hanging on the corner, going home.”
Then came a girl who was up for the challenge.
Senior Shayna Ward, a two-time runner-up for the state championship under Sherman’s tutelage, has one last shot this weekend at becoming Tech’s first champ ever, boy or girl. Should she win at the state finals in Bakersfield this weekend, Ward would also become Oakland’s first wrestling champ of any gender since 1983, not to mention the first girls wrestling champion from an Oakland school since the California Interscholastic Federation added a girls wrestling tournament in 2011. She might represent Sherman’s last best shot at a CIF state title, the crowning achievement in high school wrestling, which has eluded him for over a half century.
She’s been training for this since she was 7, when her father, Darrel Ward, Jr., an amateur mixed martial artist, first got her and her younger sister, Layla, out onto the mat. “It’s harder now because I’ve made it to the finals twice,” Shayna, the No. 3 seed in the state for the 135-pound division, told The Oaklandside Tuesday before practice. “They expect you to win it at least once. I do feel a tiny bit of pressure.”
Shayna advanced to the state meet by winning her third consecutive North Coast Section title. Unlike Oakland boys, who qualify for the state tournament through the Oakland Section, the girls face a much tougher path against powerhouse programs from areas where wrestling doesn’t take a back seat to football or hoops.
Shayna at practice with her sister Layla, a ninth grader, at Oakland Tech on Tuesday. This is the sisters’ final practice before heading to the state championships in Bakersfield. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Shayna has company this weekend. Layla, a ninth grader, captured an NCS title in the 107-pound class. Dasani Thomas of the Oakland Military Institute, who also trains with Sherman’s wrestling club, qualified in the 190-pound class. (Tech teammate Reina Whitlock missed qualifying for the state meet by one spot, finishing fourth at the NCS finals.) A number of locals are competing in Bakersfield this week on the boys side: Alan Resendiz, Josiah Cola, Siris Bradshaw, and Stefanos Zarbalis of Skyline High; Micah Nance and Victorino Perez-Mendoza of Castlemont High; Bryan Romero of Oakland High; Juan Sotelo of Fremont High; Messiyah Seales and Rodrick Jenkins of McClymonds; and Wagner Kovac of Oakland Tech.
A wrestling revolution
Girls wrestling’s popularity has spiked in recent years, and many girls programs have launched since California added a girls state meet. Before that, most girls had to wrestle against boys. Girls participation jumped in California from 5,578 to 8,825 wrestlers from 2022 to 2025, according to a CIF report. Preseason girls tournaments are popping up in wrestling hotbeds across the state.
Before Shayna broke through for Tech in 2024, Castlemont High was the only Oakland school with top-eight finishers in the girls championships, according to CIF: Laylani Allen placed eighth in 2013; Joanna Mack placed second in 2014 and third in 2016; and Allen placed fifth in 2016. Castlemont also boasts Oakland’s lone state wrestling champion: Derrick Adams in 1983 at 130 pounds.
Shayna’s journey to the pinnacle of high school wrestling began in the Sacramento Valley, where her father recognized that girls wrestling had some momentum behind it.
Darrel recalls the agony of watching his daughter’s first matches.
“I imagine my face was white because of how many people were telling me, ‘Hey, relax!’ or ‘Hey, it’s gonna be okay,’” he said. He dealt with the anxiety by remembering how his daughters treated him when he competed: “They were gonna look at me no differently. They were gonna love me the same. So it was just like: ‘Go out there and wrestle hard. I’m gonna love you regardless.’ ”
Ward, right, squares off with Shiya Kachroo, a senior at Dougherty Valley High School as Dan Abina coaches them inside the Oakland Tech gym on Tuesday. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Ward watches on as coach Abina gives a demonstration. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Darrel knew of Sherman through clinics the Tech coach would hold across Northern California through his Bay Area Wrestling Association. And around the time the family was preparing to move to the East Bay, Sherman learned of Shayna through a colleague.
“A coach came up to me,” Sherman recalls, “and said: ‘Hey, we got somebody that’s moving down from Sacramento. She’s pretty good.’ I said, well, introduce me to her. That was it.”
Shayna and Layla were enrolled into OUSD’s Sojourner Truth Independent Study Program, which allows them to play sports for Tech while taking classes remotely. Shayna joined the girls flag football team, which won the Oakland Section title last fall. It’s been all winning on the mat as well.
“Undefeated,” Shayna says of her senior season. “36-and-0.”
At Tuesday night’s practice at Oakland Tech, Shayna high-fived novice wrestlers in Sherman’s club — girls who draw inspiration from Shayna’s work ethic, her polished technique, and her powerful takedowns honed by years of training with her father and now with Sherman, and from clinics and freestyle tournaments across the country in the high school offseason. Shayna plans to make her college decision after the state meet, no small thing now that women’s wrestling is, as of this season, an NCAA sport.
At the club, she was laughing with teammates who might well become foes down the line. The girls wrestling community remains tight-knit even as it becomes increasingly competitive.
“You just always have to remind yourself that there’s someone better than you and there’s always more work to do,” Shayna said last season. “If it’s the No. 1 girl in the nation, whoever it is, you have to wrestle your match. Every match starts zero–zero and everybody puts on their shoes the same, just like you do. You go out there and wrestle hard no matter what.”
Sherman has implored Shayna to go on the attack.
“Don’t wait on our technique and training,” he says. “Go after people. When you’re wrestling somebody and they don’t believe they can beat you, their whole objective is to stay close.
“You just have to go after people and trust in your training and be aggressive.”
The coach doesn’t take his wrestler for granted. Tech’s previous state finalist came in 1989.
“It means a lot,” he said, “to let everyone know that Oakland is here and we have some type of respect.” Sherman reflects on some of his great wrestlers over the decades, names like Michael Robinson, who took third place in the 1975 state meet, or the Abas brothers, who went on to star at Fresno State, to say nothing of the kids now in his club.
“We got girls who are wrestling pretty tough.”
The sage of Oakland wrestling
Sherman believes wrestling is instrumental to overall athletic success.
While attending McClymonds High School in the early 1960s, he fell in line with the School of Champions’ formula for a well-rounded athlete: football in the fall, wrestling in winter, and track in the spring. While at Laney College, he cofounded a wrestling club, Wan-Tu-Wazuri, meaning “beautiful people” in Swahili. The free club still meets Tuesday and Thursday nights in the Oakland Tech wrestling room.
Sherman became a standout wrestler at San Francisco State and continued to wrestle in club tournaments into his 40s. In his early years as Tech’s wrestling coach, several wrestlers placed at the state championships. The sport was a big enough deal back then that Oakland schools had full junior varsity and varsity rosters, recalls Castlemont High coach Marcus Leon, who wrestled at Castlemont and Fremont in 1984.
“Westling builds confidence,” says Leon, who considers Sherman a mentor. “It gives [athletes] time to settle down and evaluate situations to where they don’t jump into one that may be bad for them. We try to teach them to think, slow down, analyze, know your situations, and be prepared.”
Oakland Tech head wrestling coach Ashlee Sherman at practice at Oakland Tech, where he’s coached for decades. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Then, in the late 1980s and 1990s, wrestling participation plummeted in Oakland. An Oakland boy hasn’t reached the state podium since 1990. Most have struggled to compete outside of Oakland.
Leon attributes part of the decline to the lure of the streets, where quick money can be had and school and sports can become afterthoughts. Sherman believes top athletes became more focused on playing a single sport — the decision to specialize shaped, perhaps, by the pursuit of precious scholarship money. Football players went to the weight room instead of the wrestling room. Basketball players groaned when the wrestling mats covered their court. Then, of course, there’s the humiliation of grappling in front of all your friends in a wrestling singlet.
As participation dwindled, many of Sherman’s top wrestlers with Wan-Tu-Wazuri attended high schools where better competition would prepare them for state competition. One such wrestler was Olympic silver medalist Stephen Abas. Gerry, his older brother, had wrestled for Tech and reached the state championship match in 1989 before becoming an All-American at Fresno State University. Stephen instead attended Canyon Springs High, where he bested Gerry by winning a state championship in 1994, then transferred to James Logan High, where he won two more state championships.
Life lessons, from the mat
Wrestling was always about more than winning, though. Which is good, because I did a lot of wrestling in my three seasons at Tech and very little winning. When I joined Sherman’s team in 1997 as a scrawny freshman, I was more interested in making friends and dodging bullies than in any visions of placing at state. My teammate, Michael Laster, Sherman’s son, helped show me how to shoot for a takedown and sprawl to avoid one, and how to make an opponent’s eyes water with a cross-face across the nose.
Sherman kept everyone accountable. He was the sort of coach who had his club wrestlers memorize Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—,” about self-reliance.
At one practice over winter break, instead of running up to Lake Temescal, we wrestlers instead peeled off behind a convenience store, goofed around for 20 or so minutes, splashed hose water on our foreheads and ran back to the wrestling room. Sherman gave us one look, touched the cold water on someone’s forehead, and had us run the gym stairs for the next hour or so. He once made me a splint out of cardboard and wrestling tape after I broke my finger in the Oakland championships. My knuckle was never the same.
These were formative experiences for me. I remember Sherman piling us in the back of his van after one tournament and singing along with Teddy Pendergrass’s “Love T.K.O.” on KBLX on the way back from San Francisco, and I remember the van breaking down somewhere in West Oakland, deep in the night, and someone asking in the darkness, “Is this Ghost Town?”
And I can still hear him delivering his pet phrases.
“Agile! Hostile! Mobile!” he’d shout to wrestlers who were clearly none of the three.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” he’d grumble about a hard-headed student.
“It’s the fight in the dog, not the dog in the fight,” he’d intone to motivate a timid ninth grader.
Ward laughs with Sherman after their final practice ahead of the state championships. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Ward and her teammates at the close of practice on Tuesday. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
“Growing up it was wrestling every day, all day,” recalled Laster, now an Oakland teacher, whose daughters Nayumi, 10, and Malaya, 9, wrestle for their grandpa at Wan-Tu-Wazuri. “I’m trying to follow in his footsteps and give them the things he gave me. Wrestling translates through life.”
The whole family wrestled for Sherman — Laster and his brothers, Oliver and Craig; their cousins Sam, Isaiah, and Matthew. “Growing up as fathers and husbands we see he had a method to his madness,” says Laster. He recalls Sherman waking everyone up each morning to run around Lake Merritt. “I was riding my bike and he was holding my hand.”
Laster goes on: “It wasn’t about wrestling. I probably wouldn’t be here if he didn’t help me get through life by the things he taught me and showed by example.”
‘Like a little celebrity’
Shayna is now setting an example of her own.
“As a grown woman, I want to be her when I grow up,” Laketha Atkins, an Air Force veteran who now works for OUSD, said with a laugh. This was during last year’s state meet, and she was talking about Shayna. Atkins didn’t wrestle in high school, but she now trains with Wan-Tu-Wazuri. “There hasn’t been a big history of wrestling in Oakland, let alone girls wrestling. I feel like it’s very pioneering. You have a lot of people who look up to her, a lot of little girls. She’s like a little celebrity in our little club.”
Ward high-fives a youth wrestler inside the gym at Oakland Tech. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Shayna won her two 135-pound matches Thursday, the opening day of the state championships, by first-round pins to reach the round of 16. Her quarterfinal match Friday is against Sarai Cortez from Gilroy High, a state power coached by MMA legend Daniel Cormier. Sister Layla split her two matches Thursday and wrestles in the consolation bracket Friday.
Layla has drawn motivation from watching Shayna dominate the high school landscape.
“She doesn’t care when people say how good they are,” Layla says. “She just goes and wrestles and beats them. I try to do what she does because she inspires me.
“Anything can happen and anyone can be beat.”
For Shayna to claim a state title, she will likely have to go through top-seeded Zahra Stewart of Orange Vista High of Perris. Zahra pinned Shayna in the third round of last year’s finals in Bakersfield for the 125-pound crown.
It was a crushing outcome for Shayna, but as she gathered herself afterward in the tunnel of Dignity Health Arena, she vowed to return stronger for her senior season. She would give herself a little break in the offseason, turning to her other passions — photography and food (her go-to In-N-Out order: “Two Double-Doubles and a Neapolitan shake”) — but soon the work would begin again.
“I just have to work on just getting my offense going a little quicker,” she said then. “Even though it is a little disappointing, I’m really proud to represent Oakland and him [Sherman]. It’s an honor to be able to do that.”
Ward hypes herself up after her final practice before heading to the state championships. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney for The Oaklandside
Sherman’s spirits lifted as he looked to Shayna, sparring with Layla as their father gave instruction.
“I’ve been introduced to a lot of kids,” Sherman later told me of first meeting the Ward family. “It’s always good, but it’s better when they show up.”
In the twilight of his coaching career, they showed up.
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