Nakayla Dawson has wrestled her brother for years. The rest of the state has no chance.

The wrestling room at Westland Glenn is abuzz with activity.

The room is filled with wrestlers paired up working on moves, always looking for an edge, in simulated matches.

The buzzer sounds and everyone stops. Well, almost everyone.

Two wrestlers keep at it, and the one on top is not stopping, preventing the one underneath from moving.

Finally, the wrestler underneath reaches up and throws a punch at the wrestler on top, which ends the session between the two.

The punch at the end isn’t an unusual occurrence when these two particular wrestlers go one-on-one at practice.

“When we wrestle, most of the time it gets out of hand,” senior Robert Dawson said. “Most of the time, I’m really pushing her because her gas tank gets low. Sometimes I’m just trying to push her through it, trying to make her push herself. I’m just giving her good wrestling.”

Her?

Yes, Robert was wrestling against sophomore Nakayla Dawson, a defending girls state champ who last weekend was third in the boys 106-pound class of the prestigious Evans-McGinnis Invitational in Battle Creek.

Dawson, at 5 feet 5, simply does not back down from her older brother.

"Sometimes,” she said, “we get into fights and we have to be separated.”

Sometimes? Did she say sometimes? Seriously?

“There’s not one practice,” she said, “we can go being together the whole time.”

That’s more like it.

To hear Robert tell it, he is simply trying to help his little sister improve ... getting her upset is a sweet bonus.

Robert wrestles at 120 pounds — he won the Battle Creek event — and he is a two-time state-meet qualifier; a few weeks ago, he recorded his 100th career victory.

“Most of the time it’s me trying to push her,” he said. “If I know she has to wrestle somebody tough this week, I’m going to push her, not let her wrestle easy at practice.”

'A better option than just sitting there'

Having her older brother as a partner does make Nakayla work harder, especially since he refuses to make it easy on her in practice.

“Mostly if she’s wrestling easy, I won’t let her get up if she’s not doing her best, not really trying,” he said. “That’s when I keep her on the mat after time expires.

“I help her get better.”

Robert is trying to play the role of a humanitarian. Who knew?

Nakayla didn’t begin wrestling until late in the seventh grade and it was only because she and younger brother Kyrin, now an eighth grader, had to sit through Robert’s after-school practices before they could go home together.

“We’d sit and watched them wrestle at practice and it looked fun and I wanted to do it,” she said. “Going to the tournaments, I was always bored, so wrestling seemed like a better option than just sitting there.

“So I went out for the team.”

There were no other girls on that club team, so from the get-go, Nakayla’s competition came from boys.

It was that way last year, too, when she was a Glenn freshman compiling a 41-2 record. She wrestled against boys in the regular season until she entered the girls state tournament and easily won the 105-pound class.

Nakayla wasn’t challenged as she breezed through the tournament in surprising fashion.

“It was easier,” she said of wrestling against girls. “I was nervous going into my matches, but I never thought I was going to lose.”

She never lost, which is why it seems unlikely she will even attempt to defend her title in March.

“It didn’t really feel like anything,” she said. “I felt it wasn’t that hard, that’s why.”

That’s why what?

“We’re thinking that I’m doing boys,” Dawson said.

Ready from the start

This season, Dawson is 29-6 against virtually all-male competition. She is one of six female wrestlers on the Glenn team this season and is ranked No. 10 in the Michigan Grappler 106-pound boys rankings.

Bill Polk, in his 26th season as Glenn’s wrestling coach would not give Dawson his blessing to wrestling against the boys unless she could hold her own.

“She’s a talented athlete,” he said. “To be good at this sport, you have to have a little bit of that natural ability and she’s definitely got that. She’s a competitive young lady that doesn’t really get intimidated by much so she’s got a real good demeanor.”

Polk knew who Dawson was when she first showed up as a freshman, but didn’t know if she could be a factor on the team that season.

“We knew she was pretty good coming in because Robert had been here a couple of years before,” he said. “We had a chance to work with her the summer before she was a ninth grader. So I knew she had some talent, the extent of that I didn’t know until we got her on our mat in our lineup.”

Nakayla became a fixture in the lineup from the opening meet and she let it be known she would be just fine as soon as the season started.

“We knew she was going to be good, but right away her opening week, she was taking on a young man who ended up placing in the states for the Oxford boys and she beat him,” Polk said. “And she never really looked back from there.”

She never looked back because Robert was always pushing her to look ahead because he knew she could excel.

“I could see how aggressive she was,” Robert said. “Once she got into high school and got into the room with us, I knew we could touch up a couple of things and perfect little things she was missing.”

Watching Robert and Nakayla go after one another in practice can be quite entertaining at times.

“They’re very competitive with each other,” Polk said. “They practice together on occasion and they’re definitely not nice to each other. They tend to push each other. I imagine it’s probably been going on a lot longer than it has been in my wrestling room.”

Dawson’s mother, Lauren, had concerns about her only daughter wrestling against the boys. She wasn’t concerned about the winning/losing part of it — she was worried about how the boys may react to losing to a girl.

“It definitely built her character and makes her a lot stronger because we’ve definitely seen boys wrestling her dirty because they don’t want to lose to a girl,” Lauren said. “She tells me about boys pinching her stomach.

“She’s been headbutted. She used to wear two braids and someone grabbed her by her hair and flung her down.”

A precursor to all of this was the way Nakayla and Robert treated each other around the house during their formative years. There were many minor skirmishes, but they never really broke anything valuable.

Lauren remembers the day she told the two of them to clean up the kitchen and Nakayla told Robert he had to do the dishes alone.

“That day they start tussling, they’re tearing up the kitchen,” Lauren said. “I said I wasn’t getting in the middle of that, they’ll figure it out. They had the sprayer and were dunking each other’s head in the sink. Well, Robert gave up and ended up cleaning the kitchen up and Kayla went to bed.”

A real future in this sport

All evidence to the contrary, Robert has always been Nakayla’s protector. He is the one who watches out for his younger sister. He is also the one who builds her confidence, in his unique way.

“In a real match, all the boys, when I see them wrestle her, they try to go out there and look like they’re trying to kill her,” he said. “I’m trying to show her that she’s way better than these boys.

“I feel if she can put up with me, there’s no way that these guys can beat her.”

Lauren is no wrestling expert, but even she understands her daughter’s desire to wrestle in the boys state tournament this season.

“When she wrestles girls, it’s not even in the same category as wrestling the boys,” her mother said. “When I asked her why she doesn’t want to stay in the girls, she said she feels like it’s not beneficial for her to wrestle girls that she knows she can easily beat.”

Last summer, Nakayla competed in the national tournament in Fargo, North Dakota, and placed fifth in the girls 105-class in the under-15 division.

That was the last time she wrestled against girls.

Robert said he was incredibly proud of his sister after she won the state championship last March. He said he was so happy couldn’t stop smiling.

He said everything changed in the family dynamic once they began wrestling.

“Ever since we were kids, I didn’t know what we were going to do growing up, but I knew we had something going for us once we started sports,” Robert said. “That was a good path for us. We really could see what we were good at.”

The path wrestling has for Nakayla may take her to college, which she never imagined back in seventh grade.

“I really had no expectations,” she said. “But now, I could probably go to college for wrestling. I’ve thought about it.”

Mick McCabe is a former longtime columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at mick.mccabe11@gmail.com. Follow him @mickmccabe1. Order his book, “Mick McCabe’s Golden Yearbook: 50 Great Years of Michigan’s Best High School Players, Teams & Memories,” now at McCabe.PictorialBook.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Why Westland Glenn wrestler Nakayla Dawson won't defend state title