Girls’ Wrestler of the Year: M-A’s Folashade Akinola

Whether it’s the singing and dancing to stay loose leading up to a big match, or her signature cartwheels after a big victory — oh, and that smile that leaves everyone glowing in its wake, except for her opponents of course — there is no show on the Central Coast Section wrestling circuit quite like Akinola.

“Her routines, she gets on the mat and lights it up,” Menlo-Atherton head coach Phil Hoang said. “And I think for a kid who hides in the shadows, because of who she is and where she comes from … that environment, she’s not comfortable in; but on the mat, in that little space, she absolutely thrives.”

With a career record of 65-9 with 43 pins, she’s been thriving her entire M-A wrestling career.

Akinola is a four-time CCS individual champion and this year earned her first state championship, closing her illustrious high school career in style, sweeping through five matches with five straight pins.

With this, she was the clear-cut choice as Daily Journal Girls’ Wrestler of the Year for the second straight year.

Akinola’s genuine persona was born from a litany of personal turmoil. The East Palo Alto native and her family endured homelessness in her early high school days. Even now, the subject is one of worry about what the future might hold in this respect. She also suffers from bipolar depression.

“So, a lot the time I’m stressing and running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” Akinola said. “So whenever I have a chance to be happy, I like to spread that positivity and just have a good time when I can.”

“Like” might be putting it mildly. Akinola loves to spread the love, and never misses a chance to revel in the family she has found through the sport of wrestling. Her M-A teammates mean everything to her, a bond formed from building a girls’ wrestling program out of nothing four years ago.

Now, the team has two state wrestling champs in its brief history. Prior to Akinola’s title this season, Chelsea Wilson earned the championship at 106s in 2016-17.

The Bears also sent a program-record seven wrestlers to the state tournament this year — six of whom were seniors — and saw four of them reach the podium. M-A took second place in the team competition, a staggering accomplishment considering the team scored 92 points, finishing just behind state-champ San Fernando with 104 points from a pool of 13 individual qualifiers.

“It was this group’s swan song,” Hoang said. “We started this team four years ago and it was just a scrappy team who didn’t know anything about wrestling, except for maybe Chelsea Wilson and Fola.”

Akinola started wrestling prior to middle school, cutting her teeth at the East Palo Alto Wrestling Club. Unlike a majority of M-A wrestlers, who didn’t discover the sport until they reached high school, Akinola entered her freshman season with a wealth of experience.

As is often the case with girls’ wrestling, especially for newer programs that perhaps don’t have depth enough to compete as a team, M-A encouraged its girls to wrestle in boys’ matches when the chances arose.

This is especially familiar sight in the lightweights, where boys’ teams run into trouble finding wrestlers who weigh in the low 100s. For a girl, though, to compete in the heavier weight classes is rare.

Not only did Akinola prove a trailblazer in this respect, often wrestling for the boys’ team as an underclassman, her well of tactical experience and rich arsenal of maneuvers meant she was generally a force even in facing boys.

“It was nice to be able to have an opportunity against someone that was my size, my strength level,” Akinola said. “Just switching over to the guys’ side … I was able to hang with the boys a little bit.”

She’s being modest, according to Hoang.

“Fola is way more aggressive than most wrestlers I’ve seen,” Hoang said. “And she hangs with guys … and takes them down in co-ed practices all the time.”

Akinola’s senior season was all about girl power, though.

It helped the Bears added two girls’ varsity assistant coaches this season in Melanie Cordero and Lahi Kanakanui, both of whom graduated from NAIA national powerhouse Menlo College in 2018. The two joined coach Maria Smith — mother of Anna Smith, an M-A junior and the Bears’ only non-senior to qualify for the state tournament — to round out Hoang’s coaching staff.

“We had a lot of woman power during the year that was amazing,” Akinola said.

For Akinola, though, the season was ultimately about unfinished business. As a junior, she missed most of the regular season due to a knee injury. She resumed practices just 10 days prior to the 2018 CCS championships. And while she reveled on the CCS stage, she fell shy of a state championship by taking second place, an outcome Hoang said he is certain would have been different had she wrestled all year long.

This year she had a brief scare early when her knee swelled up at he Napa Valley Classic. It was scary in the moment, though Akinola can laugh about it now, joking that she injured it while feigning a marriage proposal to a teammate. That’s because once she returned she was unstoppable, marching toward an undefeated 16-0 record with 14 pins on the year.

“After a couple weeks she was back on the mat again,” Hoang said, “and I don’t think she was going to let anyone stand in the way of a state title.”