Samantha Dupee broke her nose wrestling this year. It was the second time in her career that she suffered a broken nose wrestling.
The first time came when she was in elementary school, fresh to the sport. A boys head hit her squarely in the nose. She didn’t give up then, and she didn’t give up when this time it happened with the stakes higher.
Dupee was practicing the day before the first match of her senior season with the Ewing High School girls wrestling team when she was hit and broke her nose again. It put her final scholastic season in jeopardy, and made an already challenging sport even tougher.
“It was definitely challenging,” Dupee said. “I had to wear a face shield, which you had to adjust to that and get used to having blind spots. That was probably one of my biggest challenges. But also the girls since my freshman year, there have been so many more girls in regions and my weight class had a lot of girls too that were very strong and they wanted it a lot too.”
Dupee had to first fight to get back on the mat. She was on restrictions that kept her from the usual wrestling training, severely limited her conditioning and forced her to budget her efforts. She would follow her dad to the gym just to get in some sort of workout, but she had only a tight window to prepare for the Colonial Valley Conference Tournament. The tournament ended up being her first matches back.
“I was very nervous,” she said. “I didn’t really have any stamina because I hadn’t been running or I hadn’t been practicing. But I knew my stuff, I knew what moves to do. I knew it would be a challenge, but I still persevered through it.”
Dupee made a triumphant return to the mat, capturing a major decision over West Windsor-Plainsboro South’s Grace Kang, 9-0, in the final to win the 120-pound weight class. It was her second straight championship title at the tournament previously known as the Mercer County Tournament.
“I knew I had to give it my all because this would be my second time wrestling in counties and I really wanted to make it two times that I would have won,” Dupee said. “So I went out there having the mindset that I would give it my all no matter the outcome.”
The senior was joined as a gold medalist by teammate Alexandra Neuberger, who won the 152-pound crown with a pin in 36 seconds. They helped highlight the Blue Devils’ second-place team finish behind Trenton. Ewing scored 147 points to pull away from third-place Hamilton West (134.5).
“It’s a very big accomplishment,” Dupee said. “I was so proud of everybody that tried their best and placed. It was just so crazy to see how far we’ve gotten in just my high school years.”
Dupee gets some credit for that development. When she joined the Ewing wrestling team as a freshman, it was co-ed. There were only two girls.
“Sam was actually a huge part of our recruitment, whether it was just like influencing girls whenever they would come and watch our matches and encouraging them to give it a shot,” said Ewing coach DJ Zedalis. “Whether it was one of her friends and she makes a bet with them and wins and says, now you have to wrestle.”
Dupee helped encourage girls to join the team at interest meetings and promoted the sport that she fell in love with in fourth grade.
“I started with the Ewing Rec program,” she said. “I was always an active kid and have so much energy and my mom was tired of it because I would always roughhouse around her. My neighbor, her son was wrestling so my mom brought me to a program one day. It was the Ewing rec program and it just stuck with me ever since.”
The physical sport appealed immediately to Dupee. It got tougher when she started in high school and girls still had to wrestle mostly against boys.
“It was pretty tough wrestling with the boys,” she said. “My freshman year, I didn’t really wrestle any girls until regions. So that was tough. But before, I got my name out there with wrestling boys because I used to wrestle boys and I would do a good job. It was just my senior year that Coach Z started getting all these girl matches and being able to wrestle so many girls teams.”
Over the last two years in particular, Dupee has helped to bring along the new Ewing wrestlers that don’t have as much experience after their later starts.
“I would definitely help them,” said Dupee. “Like if they were having trouble with doing a move I would go up to them and show them how to do a certain move. And when we had our tournaments, I would go up and start screaming stuff to do so they would know what exact move to do and they would definitely listen.”
Dupee had plenty of success behind her suggestions. The two-time area champion went on to finish her career at Ewing in a fifth/sixth place match at the Central Region tournament, falling to Maeve Witte of Freehold Township. She’s one of three senior girls along with Franchesca Edouard and Ynsi Santiago graduating from the program, but leaving it much healthier than only a couple of years ago.
“As big of a loss as those three are going to be, the work that they’ve done with the younger girls, I think they’re leaving behind a legacy and the knowledge and just commitment to the team that resonated with the girls to where I think that’s just going to build tradition within the program,” Zedalis said. “It just kind of creates a culture to where these girls are just going to continuously get better and better and better as the years go on.”
It’s not the first sport of which Dupee is getting in on the ground floor. She’s already gearing up for another spring on defense with the Ewing High girls flag football team. The Blue Devils are looking to build on last year’s successful inaugural season.
“We have a bunch of athletic girls on the team, so I’m hoping we do very good because we did awesome last year,” Dupee said. “We only lost one game last year.”
Dupee, who also enjoys snowboarding in her spare time, likes flag football enough that she is considering pursuing it in college, although if a wrestling scholarship opportunity comes knocking, she would find that appealing. Both sports are relatively new statewide, with girls wrestling set to officially become a team at Ewing next year.
“It’s definitely different,” Dupee said. “Wrestling is more like of an individual sport because you’re wrestling for you, but you’re also wrestling for a team. And flag football is like everybody comes together to do the game.”
Dupee will have a couple of months of flag football before she will be graduating and finalizing her next steps. She will be able to look fondly back on her athletic experiences at Ewing, in particular the camaraderie she felt over four seasons of wrestling.
“Just having what we had at the Ewing wrestling team, like having a family and always someone to lean on,” Dupee said. “And making so many friends with the wrestling team.”
Samantha Dupee had a hand in helping to promote and develop the team. The wrestling program had 14 girls this year and the hope is to get 20 by next year.
“I’m very excited to see the program still grow and Sam can look back hopefully whether it’s next year or four years from now or 10 years from now and just realize that her influence on this next generation coming in played a significant part in the girls wrestling team,” Zedalis said. “I’m going to start calling it a team. I hope she looks back and is proud of what she was capable of during her time here.”
