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Carrying the Weight: Porter’s Garley wins Powerlifting State Championship
HOUSTON – Carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders can be a crushing feeling at times. It takes an insurmountable amount of strength to push through.
Bella Garley was faced with the weight as she stepped up to the weight rack at the 2022 Texas High School Women’s Powerlifting Association 5A Big School State Championships on March 19. Not just the discs placed on each end of the bar, but everything else.
Her father, Dale, was lying in a hospital bed in Houston, dealing with complications from a leg amputation surgery since December 2020. Her mother, Amy, had just come in from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Bella was born and raised until the seventh grade, as she works out of state. On top of all of that, the Porter High School senior had been home with the flu and unable to lift the previous week.
Despite all of that, all the adversity of the last week and the last year, Bella did what she does – carry it.
Bella, competing in the 259-pound division, squatted 395 pounds, benched 215 pounds and deadlifted 355 pounds. It gave her a total of 965 pounds for the state meet and the 2022 THSWPA State Championship in her division.
“I did have this anxiety, but I was able to channel it into my lifts and use it as motivation to give me the strength to life PRs that I hadn’t before,” Bella said. “It is very empowering, because it was just me. I worked by myself, and I was able to succeed at the highest level. It tells me I am a lot stronger than I think I am physically and mentally. It was an indescribable feeling.”
Once Bella secured the state title, winning by 65 pounds, she immediately ran over to Amy in the stands, and they embraced.
“We just hugged because of everything we’ve been through the past few years,” Bella said. “I was able to overcome it and come out on top.”
After making the trip back from Corpus Christi, Bella and Amy headed to the hospital. The senior walked into the room to see her dad. The next thing she did was show him her state championship medal.
“For me to win and come back, and for my dad seeing me succeed, I think is giving him something to look forward to,” Bella said.
Now, what you may be thinking is Bella has been a powerlifter her entire high school career and this was the culmination of years of work.
No.
In fact, Bella has played softball since she was three years old and plays for Porter. She is also signed to go play at the next level at Kilgore College.
So, where did powerlifting come from?
“I liked the individuality of it,” said Bella, who is in her first year of powerlifting. “Softball, I have been playing all of my life, which is a team-oriented sport. But with powerlifting, it is an individual thing, and it can be very empowering once you find your worth through it. I realized I was decent at it, and so I wanted to be incredible at it.”
It was also a chance for her to go outside the box of just playing softball, which Bella said is something her parents encouraged her to do.
What powerlifting also gave her, outside of being a state champion in her senior year, was empowerment.
“It has given me a tremendous amount of confidence,” Bella said. “As a female athlete, I struggled a lot with body image. I’ve always had that issue of feeling that I don’t belong in certain sports because I look a certain way. Going to powerlifting and, with it being this broad spectrum of girls who can all be good at it, but we’re all built differently, it gives a tremendous self confidence boost.”
As she plays her final season of softball for Porter this spring, Bella hopes that her stepping into the weight rack for powerlifting will give another girl the same feeling it gave her.
“For me coming into powerlifting this year, if I saw somebody that looked like me, I’d be like ‘Oh, I can do it’,” she said. “Hopefully, I can be that person for other girls.”
Breaking Barriers: Eisenhower’s Palacios making history as first-ever Aldine ISD female powerlifter
When Mia Palacios walked out to soccer practice one day, the Eisenhower junior pulled out her phone to show a video to assistant soccer coach Kevin Goodwin.
The video was of her lifting 225 pounds of weight at her local gym.
Goodwin, who coached powerlifting years ago and saw State qualifiers in his time as the Athletic Director of Center Independent School District, knows when he sees a powerlifter.
After seeing the video, Goodwin immediately walked into the school to find the powerlifting coach.
“I ran inside and told Coach [Ray] Metoyer, I’ve got you a Regional Qualifier,” Goodwin said.
Metoyer added: “I brought her in our weight room just to see what she could do. She did well.”
So, the coaches got Palacios into the weight room and started putting her through a powerlifting workout with the proper equipment and technique.
In February, Palacios entered her first powerlifting meet in Conroe. In the 123-pound weight class, the junior squatted 230 pounds, benched 95 and deadlifted 235 to take second place overall.
“It was a really good experience, especially for my first time,” Palacios, who started “playing around with weights during quarantine”, said. “I feel more comfortable now that I know what it’s like and how everything goes.”
Her total weight of 560 pounds put her fourth place overall in the region and qualified Palacios for the Regional Powerlifting meet, which is set for Tuesday at Alvin High School. If she finishes in the top two she will advance to the State Powerlifting Meet or if she hits 725 pounds.
With Palacios competing in the Conroe powerlifting meet, she made history for not only Eisenhower High School but also for Aldine ISD as the first-ever female powerlifter.
“There’s a lot of girls who have asked me about it,” Palacios said about the growing interest since she has started competing. “They say ‘hey, I didn’t know we had a team, how do we get into it?’. It’s definitely something that there’s interest in.”
Aldine ISD added powerlifting just four years ago and 2022 is the third year of powerlifting in the district. But when it comes to the sport, there can be some misconceptions.
When people initially think about powerlifting, they think about big, strong, men lifting big weights. This idea can be one that scares girls away from the sport. But Palacios tells people who ask her, “just get into it, it’s fun”.
“There’s a lot of girls in powerlifting and they still have their feminine side,” Palacios said. “So, you can do both.”
Metoyer added: “She’s real good at it. I hope other girls in the district see that it is not only boys that can lift but also girls can. After they see what Mia has done and being so successful, I think it’s going to draw more girls to the sport next year.”
As Palacios – who plays soccer, powerlifts, is in the band and sits in the Top 5-percent of her 2023 graduating class at Eisenhower – walks into the weight room to get her next workout in, Goodwin continues to field more and more interest in the sport that Palacios is blazing a new path in the district.
“Since [she competed in Conroe, I’ve had at least 10 girls say to me in reference to how do I join?” Goodwin said. “It really has blown up.”
But how has Palacios, who didn't start powerlifting until two weeks ago have found so much success already?
"She works, she's a hard worker," Metoyer said. "I talked with the head soccer coach, and she said she is the same way. In the two weeks I've had her she works harder than those boys in there. That's why she's so successful. Anything she does she works hard at it, not only at athletics but also in the classroom.
"She's small in stature but her heart is bigger than she is. She's dynamite in the weight room as far as work ethic."