Daily Journal Athlete of the Week: South City’s Khloe Meisenbach

Only, Meisenbach was suffering through a string of injuries. After breaking her collarbone as a freshman, she attempted to return to the mat too quickly, and was sidelined again, this time with a torn ACL.

“When I was injured, she came in and tried to work with me,” Meisenbach said. “She wanted to work with me, and I was injured. But I learned some good stuff from her. Really, what she said to me, what she taught me, stuck with me even till now.”

Meisenbach has earned Daily Journal Athlete of the Week honors for doing what no South City wrestler has done since Salem, bringing home a Central Coast Section girls’ wrestling crown Saturday at Watsonville High School.

Personifying a wrestling attitude coach Temo Cervantes calls “the monster,” Meisenbach put on an aggressive display that showed she took to heart the wisdom Salem imparted to her two years ago.

“When you’re tying up with someone, you’re dominant; it’s your ties, you control it,” Meisenbach said. “And you don’t let them take anything from you.”

That’s the mantra of “the monster,” and the senior was in ferocious form Saturday. Meisenbach earned three straight pins to reach the championship finals in the 140-pound bracket, then finished in dominant fashion with a 12-0 major decision over Santa Teresa senior Peyton Front to claim the title.

“It was something she’s developed over time,” Cervantes said. “A lot of people kind of look at it as being overconfident, but that’s just us showing what we’ve worked these last four years. She’s never had that confidence and sometimes she’s wrestled close matches, and now she’s just let loose. The monster came out.”

Meisenbach is a year-round wrestler, but her 2022-23 spring/summer campaign with the South San Francisco Gator Wrestling Club was derailed when due to the collarbone break, an injury she suffered in the days following her freshman season for the Warriors. After missing the postseason in her first year of varsity wrestling, the ACL tear sidelined her for the postseason as a sophomore.

“Yeah, I wanted to win CCS my sophomore year,” Meisenbach said. “I thought it would have been doable, but stuff happens, and I couldn’t. I had to get surgery. But then I went back the next year and, I had some learning to do my junior year so it was just a learning curve.”

The confidence, though, was clearly there.

“It’s just her personality,” Cervantes said. “She can be the sweetest girl when she wants to be, but she can be the monster when she wants to be.”

As a junior, Meisenbach was still trying to channel the vigor that has become the signature of her senior season. She made the CCS podium in 2024-25, but settled for fourth place, earning the last automatic bid to the state tournament in the process. She posted a 1-2 record in Bakersfield.

“We suffered a lot since last season,” Cervantes said. “We didn’t get the results we wanted in Bakersfield. ... We wrestled some of the best girls in the state all summer long (on the club circuit), and sometimes we won and, near the end, things weren’t going our way. And we ramped practice up.”

Meisenbach’s intensity now seems to have its own orbit. In her corner Saturday in Bakersfield was former El Camino coach Ray Reyes. And, after her championship victory, one of the first congratulations she received was from Capuchino coach Steve Matteucci, formerly the coach at South City when Salem wrestled there.

“I love the Capuchino coaches,” Meisenbach said. “They’re amazing. They’re so close with South City. There’s a bunch of history there. So, the whole time they were telling me that they believed in me and they know I can do it.”