PHOENIX — It was about the middle of the second round of her Feb. 22 state championship match when Jussiah Bamba started to take control.
After that, she rolled to what will be her only high school state wrestling crown, defeating Sophia Smith of Canyon del Oro, 7-2.
The win gave Bamba, a senior at Ironwood of Glendale, the Division I title at 126 pounds. She accounted for all 25.5 of the Ironwood girls’ team points at state by herself, placing the Eagle girls ahead of 35 other scoring teams in Division I.
Her performance was one of several strong ones at Veterans Coliseum by West Valley wrestler girls at state.
“Something kicked in, in my mind (in the second round),” Bamba said after collecting her state-title award and the printed bracket poster. “It was my last match, so I knew I had to go, then.”
Bamba placed third at 120 pounds in 2024 as a junior. She finished her senior year with a perfect 42-0 record, dominating her first two 126-pound opponents at state before outlasting Bella Terrian of Canyon View in the finals.
Bamba, the second Ironwood girl to win an individual state title, waved the flag of her native territory of Guam after her victory in the final. She said she started wrestling when there was no girls program, wrestling boys, and is proud to be an ambassador for Arizona girls wrestling.
“I like to be a part of it,” Bamba said. “It will be part of history, for sure.”
Another state champion is Liberty sophomore Faith Stevenson, her team’s lone title winner this year. She pinned all four of her state 185-pound opponents, including 41-1 senior Taina Uasike of Mesa Mountain View in the finals in only 1 minute, 18 seconds.
“It was a little scary, at first,” Stevenson said of being in a championship match at state for the first time. “I was a little nervous. But I tried to think about my game plan, and only think about that.”
Stevenson went 47-5 this year and led the young Liberty girls team to a second-place finish, though the Lions were a distant runner-up to D-I champion Sunnyside.
“We were skeptical about winning state this year because we lost some really good girls and have almost a new team,” Stevenson said. “But we also wanted to show everyone what we’ve still got.”
She, too, embraces the ambassador role for girls wrestling.
“That feels really cool,” she said.
Liberty also got runner-up performances from Lola Hunt at 114 pounds and Aubree Avery at 152.
ALA-West Foothills senior Ave Risali defeated Greenway’s Ruthanne Chostovsky in the Division II 235-pound final, 6-0. It was the only one of her four match wins at state that didn’t come by pin; she went 24-1 for the season.
Risali only lost three matches in her last three years of high school wrestling. She went 17-1 and won the 235-pound title as a sophomore in 2023, when girls wrestling in Arizona had only one division, then went 24-1 and won the Division II title last year.
Willow Canyon freshman Airyka Reyes rolled through her first three rounds at 120 pounds in Division I to make the finals, pinning two opponents and winning by technical fall in the other.
Reyes then fell behind early in the final against Mesa Mountain View’s Annabelle Kaufmann, a fellow freshman, and scored some points but couldn’t get a momentum-turning move in the final period and lost, 7-4.
Deer Valley senior Katelyn Capper won three matches at 152 pounds in Division I, placing fifth.
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Jason W. Brooks
Associate Editor
Jason W. Brooks is a News editor for the Daily Independent and the Chandler Independent.
He covers the Chandler area for both yourvalley.net and the monthly print edition while writing for and assisting in the production of the Daily Independent.
Brooks is a well-traveled journalist who has documented life in small American communities in nearly all U.S. time zones.
Born in Washington, D.C. and raised there and in suburban Los Angeles, he has covered community news in California, New Mexico, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska and northern Arizona.
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