NEW YORK, Dec. 5 -- She says she is not trying to make any kind of statement with her wrestling. "It's for me," she insists. She doesn't even follow  women's wrestling, and says, "I don't know really anything about it." But freshman Christina Luksa became part of women's wrestling history Wednesday  evening by becoming the first women wrestler ever to compete for the Hunter  College wrestling team as they faced SUNY-Maritime in their home season  opener at the Hunter Sportsplex.    Wrestling at 141 pounds, the 18-year old pre-med student took on junior Mike  Leouis. Christina fell behind 5-1 at the end of the opening period and was  down 7-2 in the second when she found an opening. She went for a reversal and  got it, narrowing the score to 7-4.     As the partisan crowd and her teammates rocked the Sportsplex with their cheers for her, Christina lost her advantage and suddenly found herself on her back. Her opponent, now leading 13-4, seized this opportunity and flattened her out, getting the pin at 4:22, with just 38 seconds left in the second period.    The Sportsplex rocked again with cheers for Christina's gutsy effort, even though she had come up short. Before the match, Christina said her teammates  "told me to go out there and do my best and kick his ass," as she laughed. "Even though I didn't win, I still felt like I kicked his ass," she said, laughing again. But she was also realistic about her loss. "I was gassed," she admitted, "and that means I need more cardio work, for sure."    Veteran Hunter Hawks wrestling coach Bob Gaudenzi, now in his 22nd year as head coach, was upbeat about Christina's performance. "She shot a nice single, she held onto the leg," he said. "She's getting better. Normally she's in a room full of other wrestlers and she gets right in there. You wouldn't know that it's a female or a male. It doesn't make a difference. She gets right on there and she goes. So technically she's like one of the guys at this point. She's very well-respected by her teammates and I think very much accepted by her teammates."    But the coach did say "she went out there a little nervous" and "needs some work on her defense." He said, "There was one or two situations in the match where the match could actually have been turned around, where if she just followed through on one or two moves, she was scoring the points. And she was scored upon, just because of a lack of experience with some defense. But that's something we've been working on as a team, and I think that's going to improve for her."    Perhaps the main reason for Christina's nervousness was the unusual media attention afforded her Hunter wrestling debut. Reporters from the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and television stations WB channel 11 and WABC channel 7 all swarmed over her, a rarity if not a first for media attention to college wrestling in New York.     Coach Gaudenzi said he "tried to keep it as low key as possible because I knew there was a lot of pressure on her," being her first college match and she being a freshman. But Christina recalls the coach asking her all week, "Are you ready? Are you ready?"    For Christina, "If I could just be a wrestler, that would be cool. Just like, the attention wouldn't be there. It would be easier." But she is not, and the attention, as she said, comes with the territory. She also is not asking to wrestle other women. "If there was a girl's team then I don't think I would join," she said. "I've never wrestled a female so I wouldn't know how I felt. I feel really comfortable with the guys."    In fact, Christina's reasons for wrestling sound the same as any other wrestler, male or female. "The physical contact, the need to keep up, always in shape, even when you're not wrestling. During the summer you have to keep up with it. It's a matter of strength you need. It's an individual sport, so it's all on you," she explained.    Christina only started wrestling last season as a senior at Brooklyn's Franklin D. Roosevelt High School. She went 4-7, all against boys. Now she feels this match is helping her confidence. "He got me down and I grabbed ahold of his leg and kind of locked it there and he couldn't get it free. I kind of felt like I was feeling like a wrestler basically."    Nonetheless, there are still some problems facing her wrestling for Hunter. After the dual meet with SUNY-Maritime, Hunter had another meet this evening with Yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish school. Their team would not wrestle a woman for religious reasons, so Christina, even though she doesn't regularly start at 141, had no choice but to sit that one out. It didn't matter a lot, since Hunter clobbered Yeshiva 53-3, after defeating SUNY-Maritime, a state school, 41-18, but it does show that women's college wrestling is not universally accepted. Hunter is also the only school in the CUNY system (City University of New York) to have a wrestling team.    At present, according to USA Wrestling, there are five women's varsity wrestling teams: University of Minnesota-Morris, Missouri Valley College, Cumberland College in Kentucky, Menlo College in California, and Neosho CC in Kansas. Several others have women's wrestling clubs, and at least a dozen have women wrestling on their otherwise men's varsity squads, not including Hunter, a Div. III school.    Women's wrestling will also make its Olympic debut at the 2004 Games in Athens, Greece, with four weight classes of freestyle wrestling.    Despite the growth of women's wrestling, and its international acceptance, there are apparently some airheads that just haven't gotten it yet. The report about Christina's match on WB 11 ended with the sports commentator saying he thought women's wrestling was "best two out of three," and the host mumbling something about wrestling in the back seat of a car.     Yuk, yuk. Perhaps if these gentlemen would pay a little more attention to the world's oldest sport and less to trying to be junior high school-level comedians, we would all be better served. But that is why we are here, so stick with this site for the real deal from the world of real wrestling.