TEMPLE TERRACE — Isabella McFarlane steamrolled her way through the girls high school wrestling season, stacking up pin after pin, tech fall after tech fall. The King High junior was ranked either No. 1 or 2 for most of the season, and when the postseason came around, she was expected by many to win a state championship.
On March 7, she did just that.
But there was no smooth victory lap for the 170-pounder. Instead, just satisfaction for a job well done, conquering a grueling test of physical resilience and mental fortitude. When she battled her way to a 2-1 triple overtime win in the championship, she capped a remarkable season that began with dominance and ended with determination.
“I had some hurdles to overcome,” she said.
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Girls wrestling became a sanctioned FHSAA sport in the 2021-22 season, with the first official state championships held in 2022.
McFarlane became the first girl from Hillsborough County to ever win one last week.
She also won King’s first state title in any sport in decades, and joins a proud tradition of Lion wrestlers who have been successful on the mat, entering the gold medal grapplers group with boys’ champions Troy Millard (1986) and Richard Batchelor (1984).
Batchelor, now the principal at Land O’Lakes High, still stays in close contact with the school’s wrestling program, and is a fan of McFarlane. At last week’s King Alumni Golf Tournament, he confessed to watching her championship match from his cell phone while sitting in his golf cart.
McFarlane is a wrestling phenom. She started lifting weights in middle school at Greco, and King coach David Sevier talked her onto the wrestling team. She set all the school records for weightlifting by a girl, and was a bully on the wrestling mat, a remarkable raw talent that had her coaches marveling at the possibilities.
She has won two county championships — the last one the 100th win of her career — and is now 110-20 in three seasons. She finished fifth as a freshman and third as a sophomore in her previous trips to state.
But this year, her toughest opponent down the stretch was adversity. Not that it started out that way.
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McFarlane opened the season looking nearly unbeatable. She won the prestigious Walsh Jesuit Iron Man tournament in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio — billed by Sevier as the “the toughest tournament in high school during the season” — tech-falling every opponent but one and winning the final 10-2 over a two-time Oklahoma state champion.
She later added a Christmas Knockout championship at Florida’s largest girls wrestling tournament and rumbled through the regular season with a 32-0 record marked by authority.
Then, misfortune hit her — right in the nose. She lost in the district final, suffering a broken nose in the process, and had to wear a protective facemask the rest of the postseason.
McFarlane lost again at regionals, but advanced to state as the runner-up.
And because of her untimely losses, her state tournament seeding suffered. She was paired with Mosley’s TorRina Rushing in the first round. The two had been ranked 1-2 all season, and before the match wrestling experts excitedly claimed it was the match of the tournament.
“Everybody was saying that her first-round match should have been the state final," Sevier said.
McFarlane didn’t blink, pinning Rushing, helping restore her confidence. She tried not to make much of it.
“One match at a time,” she said.
In the second round, she grinded out a 12-7 win over Parkland Douglas’ Ariana Blanc, which she said was her toughest of the event.
In the semifinals, McFarlane defeated longtime nemesis Riley Lancaster of Admiral Farragut, a rematch of the regional championship, to reach the state final.
The championship match against Fort Pierce Central’s Alexa Calidonio — who beat McFarlane at state in 2024 — was a grueling 2-1, triple overtime battle of wills.
“It was definitely who wanted it more,” McFarlane said.
Sevier was more animated: “It was nerve wracking,” he said. “I lost my voice in the first 15 seconds of the match.”
It came down to the 30-second ride-out period. Drawing on weeks of training with the boys’ team, McFarlane escaped quickly during her turn on the bottom and then held Calidonio down for the full 30 seconds to secure the gold.
“It was a great feeling,” McFarlane said. “It’s kind of like a dream come true for me, because I really never expected to win a title, even as much as I wanted it. I just had to have the faith. A part of me just felt like I needed to work a little bit harder, like I need to work just do a little bit more of the right things.”
McFarlane is a state champion, after a tournament where she didn’t feel she was at her best and had to compensate for wearing a facemask, and her coaches believe her ceiling remains out of sight.
Their student agrees. She is setting her sights on the U.S. Marine Corps Cadet and Junior Nationals this summer in Fargo, N.D., the largest wrestling tournament in the world. She hopes to get on the world scene as well, and she’ll make a college visit to Oklahoma State.
Ultimately, she wants to compete at either the 2030 or 2034 Olympics.
When she was freshman at state, Sevier remembers her asking the coaches if they thought she could one day make it to the Olympics. His answer, then and now, was immediate.
“We both looked at her and immediately said, ‘Yeah,” he recalled. “Once she gets the mental part down, the Olympics is going to be easy.”
After last week, overcoming her first two losses, the toughest draw in the tournament, a broken nose, hindrance from a face shield and the pressure of being expected to win only to pull out a triple overtime win in the final, the mental part may be on the verge of getting pinned.
“I just plan to dominate and take it to everyone and wrestle harder next season,” McFarland said. “I feel like I have so much more to offer for this summer and next season.”
