Women’s Wrestling Week: Sara Fulp-Allen of Menlo was first three-time women’s college champion

One of the early milestones in the development of women’s college wrestling in the United States was the crowning of its first three-time college national champion, Sara Fulp-Allen of Menlo College. Not only was she one of the best women wrestlers in college history, but she has continued to make a difference in the sport after her competitive career ended.


Wrestling was a family activity for Sara, whose father is a wrestling icon, the late Olympic athlete and Olympic coach Lee Allen. Many people know that Lee Allen competed in the Olympics in both freestyle and Greco-Roman and that he was the USA Olympic Coach in Greco-Roman in 1980. But perhaps his enduring legacy may be as a pioneer for women’s wrestling during the very early years of its creation and expansion.


Lee Allen had daughters who became wrestlers, older daughter Sara and younger daughter Katherine. With the full support and involvement of Joan Fulp, Lee’s wife and Sara’s and Katherine’s mother, this California family made a huge impact on the development of women’s wrestling and still remains very active.


Sara Fulp-Allen became one of the nation’s top high school female wrestlers, competing on the national level at the age-group level as well as the Senior level at 48 kg/105.5 lbs. After she graduated from high school in the Bay Area, she decided to compete for nearby Menlo College’s women’s wrestling team, which was coached by her father Lee Allen.


“It worked out well. I don’t know if there was ever a feeling that we wanted to go to another school. One, our dad was our coach for most of our childhood. With our high school team, he was kind of in the background and wasn’t there every day at the high school practices. He took us to all the girls tournaments he could. That was the first time, in college, that he was our only coach, which was one reason we wanted to be at Menlo. Curriculum-wise, Menlo is a business school, and both Katherine and I had an interest in going down the business route. Looking back, I am extremely happy I went to Menlo. I loved Menlo and the culture at Menlo and am extremely happy with the education I got there. The biggest thing was being close to home and with dad, and the second was having a college where we had interests from an education point,” she said.


When Sara was a freshman, she competed in the first Women’s College National Championships held at Missouri Valley in 2004 and handily won the title at 105 pounds. The next year, as a sophomore, she repeated as the 105 pound champion, when the tournament was hosted on her home mats at Menlo.


Although she was highly successful in college, Fulp-Allen was already a top star on the Senior level. In 2005, as a college sophomore, she was the U.S. Open champion at 48 kg, competing against our nation’s best women. The college programs were developing athletes who were already internationally competitive.


“At the time, there wasn’t a full college season. If you wrestled in college, you were also on the full Open circuit. If you couldn’t compete on the Senior circuit, you didn’t have a good college wrestling experience. We would be constantly going to the Sunkist tournament, the Canadian tournaments, to the Dave Schultz, and a then a handful of girls college tournaments. The college tournaments have provided a nice gap, some space between the high school wrestler and the Open wrestler, so we can develop those girls. We still have a number of our college national champions who are making our Senior National Team, making Olympic teams and winning the Open,” she said


Her opportunity to be a four-time college national champion was derailed by an injury recovery during her junior season, which made her miss college nationals but allowed her to get back on the mat in time for the Senior-level schedule.


“I had knee surgery, a meniscus cleaned up my junior year, and I didn’t go to the college nationals at all. I believe I had the surgery in early January. I went somewhere overseas with the Senior team that year, my first tournament back. I was out about eight weeks after the surgery,” said Fulp-Allen.


In Sara’s senior year, her younger sister Katherine joined her at Menlo as a freshman, and were both competing at a high level with their father as their coach. Sara won her third college national title as a senior at 112 pounds when it was held at Pacific University, then turned her focus completely on pursuing Olympic-level goals.


“That was one year both Katherine and I talk about often. Katherine and I actually wrestled in the semifinals that year and she wrestled for third. I was in the finals with Jessica Medina that year. That was the only time Katherine and I wrestled, and I did go up a weight. Usually, Katherine was at 112, and I was usually cutting down to 105. That was a year we refer back to often, because people always ask if we ever had to wrestle each other,” said Sara.


After a long career on the Senior level and numerous international achievements, Fulp-Allen, who goes by her married name Sara Bahoura, is no longer competing. She has stayed very active in wrestling, as a coach and state leader in Virginia, where she lives, as well as serving in leadership roles with USA Wrestling on the national level.


Although she often has coached girls and women, at the 2014 Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, China, she coached three of the top age-group boys in the nation, Cade Olivas, Daton Fix and Mason Manville to a very strong performance. Sara is now giving back to the sport which meant so much to her.


“Right now, I am doing a lot of grassroots work. I have a little one at home, so I am doing a lot of administrative stuff now, trying to promote more tournaments in the state for girls and grow our state grassroots program for high school, elementary and middle school. I haven’t been to as many tournaments the last year or two that I’d like to be at, but I have been putting in the hours, working administratively for women’s wrestling,” she said.


She has had the opportunity to put many of the lessons she learned from her father into practice, now that she is helping shape the future for the next generation. Lee Allen passed away in 2012 at the age of 77, after a lifetime of success and service in the sport.


“One of the things I think back on, especially when I am training coaches in Virginia, is that my father pushed us to work with and under other coaches and to go to as many girls events as possible. It didn’t matter if it was an Open tournament, and getting our butts kicked, or it was walking through a high school tournament and beating everybody. It was so important to him for us to be registered in the female events and really help those events grow. There are so many girls out there that say ‘I don’t want to go to the girls tournament because I am wrestling the boys and I can beat all those girls.’ That was never the way my dad looked at it. We were going to go to the girls tournaments, because that is what we support. I am so happy he pushed us to do it, because that is the way people have to think,” she said.


She is very impressed by how far the WCWA has come in providing women’s college wrestling opportunities, but can see an even brighter future through more growth.


“It is awesome to see how far it has come in just the last 10 years. I am happy where it is at. I am hoping for that next level, where it is recognized by the NCAA. The gap is not that there aren’t enough programs to go to. There are not enough programs that service the girls that want engineering degrees or want to go to the medical field, which is in demand in the U.S. A lot of the programs now are liberal arts or business schools. I am hoping for the next level. I have a great athlete, Bri Csontos, who is going to go to Columbia because she wants to be an engineer and there are no WCWA schools for her with engineering. I am hoping for the next level when the programs are NCAA recognized,” she said.