Wawasee freshman Alex Garcia is focused on succeeding this weekend at the IHSGW Girls Wrestling State Finals.

It was a simple moment, and several of her peers didn’t quite understand.

‘The parade route is just a straight line through the school…’ While the hallways offered some bends and curves, befuddling a few, Alex Garcia just sat and laughed. “You mean, a straight line?”

A handful of the Wawasee coaches were offering how the parade routes would go for Garcia and her girls wrestling teammates, Garcia honored this morning at Wawasee High School, then North Webster Elementary and later Wawasee Middle School. The freshmen Garcia then would branch off from the local celebrations and head to Mooresville High School southwest of Indianapolis. The celebrating then takes a pause, and for Garcia, hopefully for only a day, as she begins her quest for a state championship.

Already holding the immortal title of being the first girl in Wawasee wrestling history to win a regional championship, the double check mark affords Garcia to be the first Warrior female to reach the State Finals. Hosted by the IHSGW, the ’emerging sport’ is seeing Garcia become an emerging force not only in the girls program, but perhaps in her own life blueprint.

“It might have been my third tournament where I felt more comfortable, going to practice and not wanting to goof off. I wanted to pay attention,” said Garcia, who had absolutely no idea how to handle the rousing ovation she got Wednesday night before the start of the boys dual against Mishawaka. “I liked the feeling of winning the (Lakeland) tournament. I enjoyed winning. It made me feel good about wrestling.”

Garcia is in just her first year of organized wrestling, and by most standards, would mean she’s wrestled for just a few months. Garcia points out that she does have years of experience wrestling her siblings in the house, but there are no referees or scoreboards in the living room unless mom comes in to break up the headlocks. But the truly green freshman found out that volleyball in the fall gave her a feeling of confidence and encouragement, and with one of her best friends, Kenidi Nine, committed to wrestling, it was a natural progression for Garcia to keep building that confident feeling.

“I don’t want to disappoint people,” admitted Garcia, opening up a little about her character. “When I was younger, my sister and I would fight, we would wrestle. I hated the feeling of her beating me. She would always win. I hated it. It has to be there why I don’t like to disappoint anyone. When I played volleyball, they were so happy I did a sport, and when I started wrestling, my dad and brother got really invested in it. So getting started, I didn’t want to disappoint them.”

Looking to her quest for the bigger title, Garcia is going to open in the 160-pound bracket against Madison’s Jasmine Mireles. There isn’t a lot of published material on Mireles, but she went 4-2 in the Southeast Regional last weekend, ending up fourth overall. Mireles won three of her regional matches via pin, but was pinned in the third-place match in just 27 seconds by Plainfield’s Sierra Patton and lost her quarterfinal match in a 37-second pin to Vigo’s Sadie Osburn.

Garcia won all three of her matches at the Penn Regional by pin, the championship a 2:30 winner over Tri-County’s Lilly Sterk. With the mindset of not wanting to lose at any cost, Garcia is thinking big this weekend.

“I’m not going to be overly happy about this until it’s done,” Garcia said. “I won’t really think about until the tournament is over. I want to go down there and do as well as I can. Maybe after the weekend is over I can think about this season and what I was able to do.”