Anyone talking with Eliana White-Vega about her recent journey into and success in wrestling will have to excuse her for her rapid-fire responses. Enthusiasm bubbles out of the 125-pound champion. She’s just that excited and grateful to be where she is in two short years.
Where exactly is that? Try silver medalist for Puerto Rico in the Pan American Championship for junior women’s freestyle wrestling (her mother is from Puerto Rico). Oh, and she won gold in women’s beach wrestling there, too, a sport she says she doesn’t enjoy and had done only once before. She also placed fifth in a national tournament in Fargo, North Dakota and competed in world competition in Istanbul, Turkey over the summer. Last season, she placed fourth in the first-ever Pennsylvania state girls tournament.
White-Vega trains at several local clubs, including D3 Training Center in Harrisburg and Primus in Dillsburg. She also trains herself and others at a gym run by her father, former Penn State wrestler Matt White, called AspireFIT on Linglestown Road in Harrisburg.
“You need to start training like you’re an Olympian before you’re an Olympian if you want to get there,” she said, her sights set on 2028.
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Currently, she’s ready to head into the first PIAA-sanctioned season of high school girls wrestling as a senior for the Cumberland Valley High School girls’ team. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, which oversees high school sports in the state, sanctioned the sport in late May after more than 100 high schools had added girls teams.
While some girls have been wrestling on boys teams for years, this will be the first season that 135-plus high schools have teams solely for girls, who will compete in tournaments and dual meets against other girls teams and finish the season with PIAA-run tournaments culminating in state championships.
Many girls new to the sport face a big learning curve, and that’s where wrestling facilities like D3 Training Center come in. Started in 2020, D3 trains motivated wrestlers four nights a week from 6:30 to 8. Located just off I-81 and I-83 in Harrisburg, the center sits at a perfect spot for wrestlers from all over the region to get to for extra drills and lessons in technique.
Just as many high school girls are new to the sport, most women who might mentor them are as well. D3 not only trains young wrestlers, it also offers clinics to train both men and women on the finer points of technique to help create a new corps of coaches.
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D3 started when Brent Zeiders—former wrestler and current assistant coach at Central Dauphin—made Craig Ritter, owner of Ritter Insurance Marketing, where Zeiders works his day job, an offer he couldn’t refuse: to use empty office space on the first floor of the business’s new building as a wrestling training center. D3 has grown quickly to train nearly 100 boy and girl wrestlers in the area. Last season, 12-15 girls sixth grade and older attended training sessions; this season, Zeiders expects more.
Because D3 is a nonprofit business, it offers college scholarships to one or two of its wrestlers each year. It also offers financial aid for those who otherwise might not be able to afford to attend training sessions there. More importantly, it offers clinics that benefit all wrestlers, bringing in Penn State wrestlers or a top female coach from New York state to offer a female coaching clinic.
While D3 does not have a woman on its training staff, Zeiders recognizes the importance of female mentoring for his girls, so he enlists female coaches like Kaitlyn Blosser, the head girls wrestling coach at Elizabethtown High School, to coach D3 girls at tournaments. Boys and girls drill together at the weeknight technique and drill sessions. Live sessions are held on Sundays from 4 to 5:15.
“Drilling and learning technique, we definitely have a handful of girls that can hang with the boys,” Zeiders said, noting that some of the girls can beat boys newer to the sport, but those girls would “rather wrestle with someone who pushes them.”
Zeiders and his staff are there to teach, mentor, support and advise. They plan to start a night just for girls this fall, too.
“Coaching a female wrestler is different than coaching a male wrestler,” said Blosser, who coached a D3 girls team made up of girls from nine different District III high schools at the National High School Coaches Association's National Duals last May, where they placed in the top 10 in their division.
Blosser, owner of Blosser Marketing Group in Elizabethtown, was a DI college crew athlete, but grew up wrestling with her dad, brothers and sister, even competing through middle school until no other opportunities existed for her. She is "determined to give back to wrestling," a sport she said "helped shaped the woman I am today."
D3 Training Center
2605 Interstate Dr, Harrisburg, PA
