Isabella Marie Gonzales named WIN’s Girls’ Junior Schalles Award recipient

Editor’s Note: WIN’s recently published Volume 31 Issue 9, the Annual Awards Issue, is available for immediate digital access to subscribers. Subscribe here (Print/Digital/Combo). WIN will announce the remaining award winners over the course of this week. 

Isabella Marie Gonzales was an accomplished gymnast and dancer in fourth grade, when, as a student within the Clovis Unified School District, where school-sponsored sports exist even at the elementary level, she had to choose between basketball and wrestling as her winter sport.

“I needed an extra sport, and I did not want to play basketball outside in the cold during winter,” Gonzales recalled. “I decided to give wrestling a try.

“My parents were shocked and nervous. I was terrible (at wrestling) at first for a little elementary kid; I was a real rookie. I was attracted to it, though, and I stuck with it.”

She not only stuck with it, but Gonzales would go on to stick the shoulder blades flat of 144 opponents throughout her prolific high school career at Clovis East High School, where she won three state titles. The lone blemish of her 163-1 career mark came in the state finals her freshman season.

The top overall recruit in the 2025 class and the No. 3 ranked pound-for-pound female prep wrestler in America at the time this article was published, Gonzales, a future Iowa Hawkeye, has been named the recipient of the prestigious 2024-25 Girls’ Junior Schalles Award as the nation’s top high school pinner.

The Schalles Award is named after Wade Schalles, who set the college pin record at Clarion (Pa.) State where he also won two NCAA championships (1972-73). During his career, Schalles defeated 153 of 159 opponents and pinned 109.

Gonzales is the second recipient of the Girls’ Junior Schalles Award, which was expanded in 2023-24.

“Ever since I started wrestling, I was always told to aim for the highest level of winning, which is to get a pin and end the match early; win it with dominance,” Gonzales stated.

The legendary Schalles commented, “What a career. What a wrestler. What a pinner! Of her 144 pins during her scholastic years, 134 of them came in the first period! Talk about dominance! And, in a state that’s known for producing some of the best wrestlers ever. My hat is off to you! You’re simply the best and I have a strong inkling that I’ll have to find other great things to say about you in the coming years as a collegiate Schalles winner.”

Gonzales credits her dad, Geoffrey, also her high school head coach this past season, for all of her success. It all started in the family garage where, ironically, the father-daughter duo started studying pinning combinations while watching a Wade Schalles instructional video, which would prove to be an instrumental teaching tool.

“If you look at most of her pins, she is using a bar-half from a Wade Schalles technique video,” the patriarch Gonzales confirmed. “The way we do it in our garage is we always troubleshoot the position. We did the entire series on the videos on cross faces and Wade’s clock theory.”

Geoffrey provided extra insight into his daughter’s pin-at-all-costs mentality.

“One of her longtime coaches taught her that she cannot leave it up to the ref,” Geoffrey explained. “You have to pin people. Dominate in a way that you don’t lose by decisions or leave it up to the referee.

“In 2018 and 2019, she had over 100 matches because she would triple-bracket at these tournaments, so she really wanted to pin everyone so she could have a break between the 17 matches in one day.”

As his daughter prepares to trek nearly 2,000 miles east to Iowa City next fall, he is confident Isabella will continue to be who she has always been. He believes the mindset training he has bestowed upon his daughter will carry her to success far beyond the mat.

“I told her, ‘You’re going to Iowa, you’re going to wrestle, and you are going to be a professional afterwards.’ We have a timeline in our garage and Isabella is sticking to it. She is manifesting who she wants to become.