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Wildcat can intimidate with weightBy JAMAL THALJI © St. Petersburg Times, published March 14, 2001 WESLEY CHAPEL -- To Wesley Chapel's Ashley Martin, the weight bench used to be this strange thing her cousins would keep in their backyard, a device used infrequently, whose purpose she didn't quite understand. Now, she can put boys to shame on it. Martin, the Wildcats' sophomore and three-sport letterman, is one of the county's top weightlifters. As a freshman, she won the Sunshine Athletic Conference's unlimited class. She has already raised the bar this year, benching a career-high 190 pounds in just the second meet of the season. Add to that her duties as the center on the basketball squad along with throwing the discus and shot put for the track team, and Martin is already one of the school's top athletes at the age of 15. Her freshman bests were benching 160 and 165 on the clean-and-jerk. What amazes her is that she hardly worked out during the off-season, yet she returned to the weightlifting team and immediately added 30 pounds to her bench. Now, the sky's the limit. "I think I can do a lot more," she said. "I'm going to try to get to 200, or 205 before the end of the season. "By the end of my senior year, I could probably be doing 250. Coach has me on these workouts and they're really working." Coach is John Castelamare, Wesley Chapel's football coach who also coaches the girls weightlifting team. "C'mon, c'mon, we need you, you're good,"' Martin recalls Castelamare's pleas during weightlifting class last season. "I said I couldn't lose anything by doing it, so I came out for it. "My coach really dragged me into it. I wasn't even interested in lifting weights. "Now I'm into it. I like it." Especially the intimidation factor. At a tri-meet with Land O'Lakes and Mitchell last week, she said a Land O'Lakes football player couldn't stand being in the same weight room watching her bench more than he could. "When I broke 190 at the meet, one of the Land O'Lakes boys got upset and walked out and left because I was lifting more than him," she said. "I was lifting more than him. His friends were all like, "Oh God, she lifted more than you."
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