Sarasota High girls weightlifting finds a home in the weight room

Sarasota High sophomore Itzel Padilla-Chavez just needed to add an extra curricular to her schedule. Now, she has a home gym in her garage. What happened? 

She joined the Sarasota girls weightlifting team. 

It’s safe to say that Padilla-Chavez, who is about as short and slight as any high school sophomore can be, does not look like the prototypical weightlifter. 

That’s because she’s not. Before joining the team this fall, Padilla-Chavez didn’t have much experience at all working out. 

“I saw during my freshman year that the team was looking for new girls to join, but I kind of psyched myself out of doing it,” said Padilla-Chavez. “When I joined this fall, I initially thought it would just be something fun to do to get some exercise and get my body moving. Once I got with the team, though, I realized that it was a community of girls and it was about more than just lifting weights.”

High school can be a hard place to find a home. All of a sudden, early teenagers are thrust into an atmosphere with “peers” that are entering adulthood. 

Photo by Dylan Campbell

Unlike college, the difference between 14 and 18 years old is a much larger gap than that of, say, an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old. 

When I was a freshman at an all-boys catholic school, every senior might as well have been Paul Bunyan himself. They were big and mean, with full beards and deep, bellowing voices. They rode to school in pickup trucks, revving their engines in the school lot. 

Meanwhile, I was escorted in the back of my mom's Honda Odyssey, the top 40 pop hits blasting through the radio.

By the time a student reaches their freshman year, most traditional varsity sports like baseball, basketball, soccer, lacrosse and football are too specialized for prospective athletes to just try for the first time. Unless the student is unusually athletically gifted, which news flash, most kids are not, the competition level is just too high. 

The athletes in said sports have been training in them since they could walk — ask any varsity level athlete in Sarasota when they started playing their sport. The median age will be 4 or 5 years old. 

Ask them how many days a week they spend training, be it in the weight room, on the field or in private lessons with professional instruction, and the answer will be similarly intense: six or seven days a week. 

Most varsity level athletes don’t have the time to engage in real hobbies outside of their sport. It’s just the reality of the commitment that is needed to play at that level. 

So how in the world could somebody who might treat a sport as a hobby and not an all-consuming lifestyle, even try to find a home in high school athletics?

More than just the physical differences between high schoolers, though, the emotional and mental gap between age groups is its own cross to bear. 

Trying to find where you fit in, in a place where everybody around you seems to have the answers, can be overwhelming. Unlike the Hollywood portrayal, adolescence is so very rarely as fun as it’s made out to be on the big screen. 

The bodies and minds of adolescents are changing at an incredible rate, all while trapped in a fishbowl with one another. For many, being a teenager is just plain old tough. 

Photo by Dylan Campbell

Schools across the country are full of students that are adrift. Programs like Head Coach Holly Shafer’s Sailors weightlifting team are there to catch them. 

What Padilla-Chavez and her 30-some teammates have found in the Sarasota girls weightlifting team is a home — which is ironic, because Olympic weightlifting includes some of the most technically complex and intimidating movements in all of sport. 

Everything about the snatch — one of three movements, including the similarly terrifying clean and jerk and more normative bench press — looks unnatural. 

The objective of the movement is to lift the barbell from the ground to over the lifter’s head in one continuous motion. The lifter starts in a deep squat, with their shins close to the bar, back straight and hands in a wide grip on either end of the barbell. 

The lifter then explodes upwards, knees driving out and hips pushing the bar up as high as possible, so that they can settle under it in a squat position, the bar held straight-armed above their heads like some sort of Cross-Fit contortionist.

Finally, the lifter squats the bar upwards, holding it victoriously high above their heads, before letting it clang ceremoniously down to the platform beneath them. 

Somehow, however, in the hands of Shafer’s lifters, the movement looks as natural as riding a bike. It’s a testament to the work that Shafer, in her third year as coach, puts in with her team and, in turn, the commitment they have to her. 

While the door is open to Shafer’s program, it is not for the faint of heart. Practices are intense, said the team, with Shafer toeing the line between being the ultimate encourager and the butt-kicking motivator that coaches need to be. 

Under Shafer, the Sailors weightlifting program has grown, both in size and in prestige. 

“Here’s the cool thing,” said Shafer. “In my first year, we only had about 12 or 13 girls on the team and we only had one girl place at the county meet and she took third. This year, we had around 31 girls on the team and had seven girls place at counties, one in first, two in second and a few in third.”

What’s really cool, though, is the type of program that Shafer has built.

It’s one that welcomes both the novice, like Padilla-Chavez, and the experienced lifter, like junior Elizabeth Lawson, a transfer from Venice who Shafer expects to make a splash at the state championships on Feb. 14 after winning the county meet in the 154-pound weight class. 

It’s a program that does more than just lift weights. It lifts the lives of everyone involved.