Leeana Mercado
Sport: Wrestling
School: Lodi
Class: Senior. Age: 17
Accomplishment: Became the first Lodi wrester to win more than one state wrestling championship
when she repeated as the 107-pound champion.
Story By Paul Schwartz / North Jersey.com
You can hear her smile over the phone.
Leeana Mercado wants to be a dentist or more precisely an orthodontist. The Lodi senior takes pride in taking care of her teeth and her smile.
“Everyone should have a great smile,” she says. And she does. At least most of the time.
Not when she gets on the wrestling mat.
“People who meet me for the first time tell me I look like I wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said New Jersey’s two-time 107-pound state champion. “Then they see me wrestle and they tell me you’re like a completely different person.”
It must be the game face, or the discipline she developed from the age of 6 when she started doing ju-jitsu with her older sister and they were the only two girls at the school.
By the middle of fourth grade, her father, who had started his girls in the sport he had always enjoyed, thought that learning how to wrestle would make her takedowns in ju-jitsu better.
So Leeana and her sister joined the program at Lodi Recreation, again the only girls in the program.
“I got a lot of that of ‘why is that girl here?’ from some of the boys, but it wasn’t really nasty,” said Mercado. “But when I started wrestling and beating them, that stopped.”
There was no question that Mercado would wrestle in high school and it wasn’t until freshman year that she actually wrestled against another girl.
“I felt I had the upper hand because I had wrestled with the boys, who were mostly taller and stronger than me,” said Mercado, who didn’t qualify for the state championship as a freshman. “But after freshman year, I really knew I wanted to get better as a wrestler and maybe represent Puerto Rico in international competition.”
She skipped her sophomore year of high school competition and went to a private wrestling academy, taking high school courses online and getting the most intense coaching she’d ever had in her life.
She trained for freestyle wrestling, the type used in international competition. “And I spent the year getting my butt whipped,” she says with a hearty laugh. But she got better.
“I’m grateful for the decision I made,” said Mercado. “But a goal of mine was always to win states.”
So Mercado returned to the high school wrestling team for the 2022-23 season and had little trouble winning the 107-pound state title, taking her six bouts at regionals and at the state championship handily, defeating Marlowe Donato of Jackson Memorial by a major decision in the final.
After a hiccup in her opening match of this season, where she was disqualified for an illegal throw, there was little trouble except for a sudden-victory win over Madelyn Carmichael of Montville in the North 1 Regional semifinal before she met Jasinti Mallqui of Pennsauken in the final.
Mercado had met former Lodi state champ Keith Dobish (2006, 189- pounder) before. And then, before the finals, she met the other recent former Ram wrestling state champ, Joey Rinaldi, the 2003 champ at 189 pounds.
“He met me on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, recognized me and said he was a big fan,” she remembers.
Then, as if she needed it, Mercado got another dose of motivation before the final.
“She (Mallqui) told another reporter she didn’t know who I was,” said Mercado, “That gave me even more reason to wrestle well in the final.”
Her college plans are not yet set, as she’s been recruited by wrestling powers from Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Illinois, but in the spring she’s set to go back to Puerto Rico, where she represented the island nation at the 2023 U-20 Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile in the 50 kilogram (110-pound) weight class. The goal this year is to get to Surrey, British Columbia for this year’s edition.
“I love to travel and I want to keep wrestling on the international level,” says Mercado.
Smiles travel well.
