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USA WRESTLI N G SUCCES S S T ORI E S


TELA O’DONNELL


by JESSI PIERCE FROM OUT OF THE WILDERNESS A


FOR ALASKA NATIVE TELA O’DONNELL IT WASN’T ABOUT BREAKING BARRIERS—IT WAS SIMPLY ABOUT WRESTLING CHILD OF THE WILD


ROOSTER CROWS IN THE BACKGROUND, waking the Bacher family before the sun rises on the horizon. It’s just another morning in Homer, Alaska.


If you’ve ever watched Alaska: The Last


Frontier, a reality TV Show on the Discovery Channel, you can picture the scene. For Tela Bacher—formerly known on the mat as Tela O’Donnell—the TV series is her actual reality. “We lived with a bunch of animals on a


small homestead,” says Tela, the first woman from Alaska to wrestle for Team USA. “I grew up playing in the woods, building forts and climbing trees. I loved just being outside and being in the woods and within nature.” In fact, it was Tela’s upbringing and surround-


ings that made wrestling the perfect sport for her. “Wrestling to me was fairly unstructured,”


she acknowledges, “which was a lot like my home lifestyle. It was perfect.”


Tela’s mom, Claire O’Donnell, built their log cabin home. A single mom, Claire did every- thing she could to teach Tela independence and to achieve success. They were lessons that Tela learned well. She played dress-up, wrangled sheep, rode horses and loved being outdoors—not unlike most children in the Alaskan wilderness. But when Tela reached junior high, she started looking for something more to do. She dabbled in gymnastics, soccer, and bas-


ketball. Then she was introduced to wrestling. An instant passion for the sport ignited inside of her from that point on. “What was so formidable about wrestling


for me is that it was so physical,” Tela says. “When you grow up in an environment [like the Alaskan Frontier], where you’re close to the earth with fishing and building things, all the work you do is physical. That’s how I connect-


JOINING COACH WOLFE’S PACK


Tela fully embraced wrestling as her sport by eighth grade. But in Homer, wrestling was a boy’s sport. Tela filed a petition with the school board to allow her to compete. From the be- ginning, Homer High School head coach Steve Wolfe was behind her 100 percent. “I am forever grateful for his attitude and


his support of my wrestling,” Tela says of her late coach who passed away in 2014. “Any- time a girl goes on to a wrestling team that is predominantly male, she kind of slips into that role of the ‘girl wrestler.’ But to him, I was just another wrestler.” Coach Wolfe made Tela an important mem-


ber of the team. He used her in practice drills to further prove to the squad that her being a girl made no difference.


ed with wrestling. It worked so well with my already physical lifestyle.”


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