Tag: Rainey state title

CYPRESS

Arlington Martin’s Camille Rainey capped her career with back-to-back UIL Texas state wrestling championships — after missing the 2025 season with an injury.

The senior from Arlington Martin won the Class 6A 130-pound final on Saturday night with a 9-2 win against Avery Fitzgerald from Rockwall.

Rainey missed the 2025 state tournament while recovering from knee surgery, but was a UIL state champion in 2024.

She is now the third Arlington Martin girls wrestler to win multiple titles, following Jessica Crane and Samara Chavez.

Across Arlington ISD, Angela Martinez from Arlington Bowie, Brenda Mallot from Arlington Sam Houston and Amanda Athon and Asia Ray from Arlington High are the only other girls’ wrestlers who have achieved that feat.

“She really worked her butt off,” Arlington Martin coach Patrick Dunn said of Rainey. “She got down and she was having rough times and her knees were hurting, and she’d be in practice in tears sometimes. But, she’s really a warrior, man. She just kept pushing through. She knew what she wanted to do.”

Rainey finished this year with a 32-3 mark, winning 18 of her final 19 matches.

She pinned two foes and then won two other matches at state by decision. Her quarterfinal match was the closest of the event.

Rainey was down 3-1 after the second period, facing Elliott Strange from The Woodlands.

Strange was a third-place finisher at 126 pounds and involved in one of two quarterfinal matchups of former medalists.

Rainey took advantage of her pace in the third period and forced two stalling calls against Strange. The latter, with 44 seconds left, gave her the 4-3 lead.

The senior ended up facing Fitzgerald for the third time this season in the finals.

The two previous meetings came in tournaments. At the Texas Women’s Classic in Lewiville on Dec. 13, Rainey beat Fitzgerald, 11-3, in the semifinals . The weekend prior, at the Rumble at the Rock in Rockwall, she pinned her in another semifinal match.

The third matchup was set up thanks to Fitzgerald pulling an upset and beating Katy’s Haley Pitts, who was 33-1 and the No. 1 overall seed in the bracket.

Rainey bucked the proverbial, saying it’s hard to beat someone three times in a year.

“I felt a little bit of pressure before the finals, but it wasn’t too much because I’ve already taken losses during the season,” Rainey said. “I’ve learned from them and went out knowing that I could do it.”

Suffering a setback

As a sophomore, Rainey posted a 30-1 mark and won the 138-pound championship. In that finals match, she posted an 8-5 win against Anna Vogt of The Woodlands College Park, who was a defending state champion.

She followed up by winning the Texas USA Wrestling State Freestyle and Greco championships. The June before her junior season, she went to the Women’s National Duals to represent Texas. She went a perfect 7-0 in Greco and was 5-2 in freestyle.

Her final big meet of the summer was the 2024 US Marine Corps Junior and 16U Wrestling Nationals in Fargo, North Dakota.

In the blood round, where a win would guarantee All-American status, she got hurt. She got caught in a single leg and was hopping around to try to escape the grasp.

Her knee buckled and she fell to the mat.

She had torn her ACL and her chance to repeat as a UIL champion in 2025 went by the wayside.

The work to get back

Rainey spent all of last season rehabbing the injured right knee. She became another coach for the Warriors, helping out her teammates by talking with them and encouraging them.

She said the rehab process was lonely, working on improving the knee every day she should. She wanted to get back to normal, but it didn’t come easy.

She still loved the environment of being around wrestling tournaments and duals, but Dunn knew she missed being on the mat.

The time away helped her with her own wrestling. She was able to watch matches instead of wrestling, her teammates’ matches, or pulling up videos of high-level wrestling.

“It’s a lot different watching the matches because you can see a lot more and learn a lot,” she said.

Dunn praised her unselfishness during what was a tough time. He said the key was not to rush her back. Could she have pushed it and maybe gotten a few matches in before districts last year? Perhaps.

But Dunn said the key was not pushing the pace too much since she had her senior year left and hopes to wrestle in college. Her brother Ryan is a freshman at Central College in Pella, Iowa. He made it down for the finals on Saturday to watch his sister win her second title.

“We’re not worried about two state titles or three state titles,” Dunn said. “It was about getting better every day and that’s what we really talked about. Are you better when you left than when you showed up? I told her that you’re competing against yourself in rehab, just like you would compete against your opponent in wrestling. She’s so competitive, and she took it to heart.”

He added, “You know, a lot of times in today’s society, you’ve got these me, me, me kids. If I’m not wrestling, I’m not going to practice. She never missed a practice. She was a leader of the girls, even though she wasn’t wrestling.”

Rainey admits the mental toll of the injury was tougher than the actual injury.

She said a key to her success was leaning on her faith during the tough times.

“It was rough being on the sidelines watching everyone accomplish everything you can’t get,” she said. “I think it was good I got injured. The year prior, I won the state, and I was losing motivation. Getting injured really pushed me to have something to prove.”

The comeback

A little more than a year after her ACL tear, Rainey returned to the mat wrestling for the Lone Star Mat Club at the Mid-Summer Mat Bash July 25-26 in Coppell.

She went 5-1 overall, but the one loss was the one that stuck with her.

Rainey said she was rushing things, and it caused her to get frustrated with herself in matches.

In her mind, she was still the 2024 state champion who had lost only once.

In reality, she was the 2024 state champion who lost one match and had a surgically rebuilt leg that was getting used to wrestling again.

Rainey had success throughout the season, winning at a pace closer to her 2023-2024 season.

“That’s a major injury; your knees are so important in wrestling,” Dunn said. “There are so many different angles. You’ve got to be able to block that out and be confident in the rehab and training you’ve done. I think it did take her a while at first to get over it. She was worried about it, which I understand. But, I would say over the last two or three months, maybe it hurt her, but she wasn’t worried about it tearing again.”

She made the finals in each of the tournaments she competed in. Rainey lost in the finals twice: at the Texas Women’s Classic and Reece’s Warriors Invitational, Arlington Martin’s home tournament.

Both times, she lost to Keller Central’s Echo Cranor. First by a 6-3 loss in overtime in Arlington and then by a pin in Lewisville, the match after beating Fitzgerald.

The only other loss came on Jan. 22 against Melissa, falling to Malia Griffin, a defending state champion and now, after this weekend, a two-time state champion.

Rainey took first at the District 3-6A tournament and then at the Region 1-6A meet the possibility was there for facing Cranor for a third time.

The rematch happened and Rainey won by a 14-5 major decision.

“She just watched a lot of film on Echo, and we figured out what she did,” Dunn said. “When Camille got in the room, she worked on it and she felt confident. She put a game plan together and she executed it. I think after she did that, she was very confident heading to state.”

One last match

Rainey’s journey to the finals to face Fitzgerald again was a tough one.

Of the 16-woman bracket, six wrestlers were all-state in 2025 or 2024.

To put that in context, none of the other 13 brackets had more than four returning medalists in any class.

This year, the UIL adopted a new format for the finals, drawing a weight class to start with. Instead of traditionally starting at 100 pounds and working up to 235 pounds, this year’s matches started at 140 pounds. Rainey’s match was the penultimate one of the tournament, at 13th out of 14. Typically, 130 pounds would be the fifth match.

Before the start of the finals, she did what she usually does. She went to the side of the mat and, on a bended knee, prayed.

“I put my faith in God, and it really helped me,” she said. “I’d pray before my matches; not pray to win, but pray to not get hurt and be thankful for the opportunity to wrestle again.”

Her headgear provided a place for her to share her faith. She has three crosses, to signify God is greater than the ups and down and Roman 8:18. The latter says “The pain that you’re feeling can’t compare to the joy that’s coming.”

The joy would come 6 minutes after her name was announced over the speakers for the 6A finals.

Rainey got a takedown early in the first period, but Fitzgerald got out of it and pulled within 3-2 on the reversal.

In the final 10 seconds of the second period, Rainey got three nearfall points with two seconds left on the clock to extend her lead to 6-2.

A mere 13 seconds into the third, she got a takedown and extended the lead to 9-2 to claim a title in a tough weight bracket.

“I think once I got over the mental barrier of the injury and believing in myself, I realized I was back,” Rainey said. “I was probably even better than I was in 2024.”