Five foot six, 130 pounds and an incredible headlock could describe many wrestlers around Leon County. What’s different about this one?

Try long, straight brown hair and a belly-button ring.

Senior Laura Maben is the first-ever female wrestler at Lincoln trained by Coach Mike Crowder.

“I heard there was never (a female wrestler) for Lincoln, and I wanted to be the first,” Maben said.

Senior Will Pafford, a four-year member of the team and this year’s varsity captain, has been impressed by Maben’s commitment.

“She’s got heart. It’s one of the things she brings to the team,” Pafford said.

Not everyone shares the same positive opinion of female wrestlers.

“A lot of other guys on other teams think I’m going to be easy to beat,” Maben said. “Others are just kind of freaked out to wrestle a girl.”

But Maben has proved them wrong. Her record this season is 4-8, and two of those victories were over male opponents, one from Chiles and Leon.

“It felt really, really good,” Maben said of her first official mat victory. “I didn’t know at the end of the match. I was so tired, and I didn’t know I had won until the referee raised my hand.”

With the victory of her first match, Maben was featured on a local television news channel and was also mentioned in the Tallahassee Democrat.

All the publicity doesn’t faze her.

“It kind of keeps me motivated because I know there’s a lot of people out there that want to see me succeed,” she said.

Maben is not given any slack because of her gender.

“Since there are no girls’ teams, Laura has to be treated just as every other wrestler on our squad,” Crowder said. “If I went soft on her and let her slide, she would not improve, and she definitely would not be beating boys.”

“Everything they did in practice, I did too,” Maben said.

There is one other female wrestler in Leon County, Samantha Burns. She attends Leon and was Maben’s second match victory.

“I’ll come and beat up the little kids that don’t know what they’re doing,” Maben joked.

“I have never had a female wrestler actually make it in a true practice for more than a day,” Crowder said. “It is not that girls can’t do it; it is more like are you willing to put up with what we have to do in practice long enough to get in shape so you can hold your own.”

Maben plans to attend Tallahassee Community College next year and major in another male-dominated field, architecture.