By: RHETT MANUEL
Sports Editor
MAMOU -- One was cut from the team in eighth-grade year and became a two-time state champion and record holder.
Another was disqualified in her original weight class and emerged a state champion in a higher weight class.
Sounds like stuff reserved for Hollywood endings. The kind where the 100-and-nothing-pound athlete emerges in a feel-good story and sees the field for his college football team.
There is no “he” in this story. There is no glamorous college football program.
As a matter of fact, it’s safe to be said there is no glamour in the Mamou High School weight room.
It’s a bare-bones operation in a corrugated metal building that can’t be more than 1,000-square feet. An operation built on multi-use weight racks, a few rusty dumbbells and a leg-press machine “we just got working this year” according to Mamou powerlifting coach Sam Terry.
From the humility of this epitome of blood, sweat and tears came girls state champion powerlifters, senior Taylor Castille and junior Claire Rider.
These are young women who epitomize the hard work required to succeed in any world. Nevermind a “man’s world” such as a gym or weight room.
Social norms and rules don’t apply when you’re winning championships and breaking records along the way.
“I heard they were starting a powerlifting team in eighth-grade. And all my life I’d been told ‘girls can’t do it, girls suck, girls this, girls that’. I needed to prove them wrong,” Castille said.
“Freshman year, I actually didn’t make the team. I told coach I have the dedication. I wanted to prove something different. I didn’t just want to be stronger. I wanted to be the best. He said he’d see me Monday. I never missed a practice.
“I got cut out of regionals. I kept working. Coach (Terry) came in and saw something different. I did what I had to do, and started making firsts.”
Those firsts parlayed into a state championship as a junior, along with a new state record. Then, senior year, another title and another record that eventually settled at 450-pounds.
Castille isn’t done, as she’s preparing to go to a national meet this summer.
Rider’s story, like Castille’s, is one of perseverance and grit. Rider is a young woman who qualified for the state meet as a freshman in the 114-class but didn’t make weight and was disqualified for being overweight.
Her solution? Defy the odds. Lean into the disqualification. Move up two weight classes and win a state title anyway.
“It took a while. It was motivation since freshman year from Coach Sam and all my teammates,” Rider said. “I grew tremendously since freshman year to a place where I didn’t think I could.
“It took dedication. It took me motivating myself, telling myself I could do it no matter how hard it was going to be and how hard it seemed. I found new competition in 132. It felt perfect. It’s the right strength and gave me the motivation to be even stronger.”
There’s an x-factor in all this, Sam Terry. A coach who showed up at the school with no prior powerlifting experience and was thrown directly into the fire of continuing to develop an upstart program.
“Where we saw numbers on the board, he’s preparing us mentally,” Castille said. “He would tell us not to look at the numbers. He coached us through it, and the weight felt like the bar.”
Terry is given a lot of credit by his champions. Terry is quick to deflect back to them and his assistant,
“Three years ago, I was working with the Department of Agriculture. I stepped away to teach and coach and was informed by Mamou High that I was going to be the powerlifting coach,” Terry said.
“I didn’t know anything about it at the time. Coach Jalen was the backbone of me learning. He’s been with me along the way and helped me learn everything I know.”
The common threads in all this success? Teamwork. Dedication. Grit.
Castille and Rider were made champions by their humble beginnings. Terry, himself, willing to learn from an assistant and be humble enough to accept coaching himself.
A Hollywood story? Maybe not. However, to call it anything but awe-inspiring would be insulting to the humility forged by those rusty weights in that small building.