Starting a girls'
program

Where the sport actually is

In 2025-26 there were 88,771 girls wrestling at 8,853 US high schools, a 19.9 percent increase in participants in one year. Coming out of the pandemic it was 31,654 girls at 4,802 schools. Every state now reports some girls' participation and 40 state associations conduct a girls' state championship.

That means two different conversations depending on where you sit. In most of the country the sanctioning fight is over and the job is adding a team at your school. In the rest, the job is getting enough schools to sponsor one that the association will act.

How sanctioning works

There is no national switch. The NFHS writes playing rules; the fifty state associations plus the District of Columbia decide what they sponsor. The route almost every state has taken has the same three stages.

• An unofficial or invitational championship first. Before it was sanctioned, North Carolina ran a girls' invitational where wrestlers entered as individuals and no team awards were given, because there were no sanctioned girls' teams in the state. Maryland ran an invitational tournament for two years before anything else. Iowa and Maine had unofficial tournaments the association did not recognize.
• A pilot period. Colorado's route was a two-year pilot required by CHSAA before sanctioning, run alongside girls-only events the association had already offered for two seasons. After the pilot, girls' tournaments became varsity events.
• A vote. Nebraska's proposal passed four of the six state districts in January before the NSAA board voted in April. Ahead of that vote the NSAA surveyed 139 wrestling coaches, and 118 favored adding a separate girls' division and state championship. That survey is the single most reproducible tactic in this whole process.

Some associations publish a numeric threshold. New York's sanctioning campaign describes a NYSPHSAA mandate that a minimum of four schools in four sections must form girls' teams before the board will consider sanctioning the sport. That is the shape of the gate in a lot of states: the association will not sanction until schools sponsor, which means the sanctioning campaign is really a school-by-school recruiting campaign.

What sanctioning does to the numbers

The effect is not gradual, and two states documented it at the time.

New Jersey sanctioned girls' wrestling as a recognized sport and created a girls' division inside the existing championship, with regional tournaments feeding a state championship in Atlantic City. NJSIAA assistant director Bill Bruno told the NFHS that about 120 girls wrestled the year before and about 430 participated the year it was sanctioned. Three hundred were seeded at regionals and 60 advanced to the state championship.

Missouri expected about 250 girls to sign up for its first girls' state championship. It received nearly 825 entries.

The Pennsylvania campaign puts the same point structurally: having no girls on your boys' team now is likely a reflection of opportunity rather than interest. Every state that has tested that claim has found the same thing.

Adding a team at your school

The mechanics are lighter than most athletic directors expect. Pennsylvania publishes its version clearly enough to use as the template, and the general shape holds in most sanctioned states.

• Club or varsity. A school may sponsor either. The team operates under the direction of the school and the principal certifies eligibility exactly as for any other sport.
• One box. In Pennsylvania the team becomes official when the athletic director indicates sponsorship in the PIAA portal. That is the act of creation. Everything before it is a conversation with your administration.
• No minimum roster. Pennsylvania states there is no minimum number of girls required to start a team, and that teams have formed without having had a girl on the roster the previous year.
• Shared everything. Girls and boys can practice together, be coached by the same coaches, use the same equipment, the same practice time, the same transportation, and enter the same events. That is what makes the cost argument work.
• Then a schedule. The hardest part, and the part nobody warns you about, is finding girls' competition in year one. Open tournaments and girls' invitationals carry a first season. The state and national events calendar is where we keep the ones we have verified.

One structural point worth putting to an administrator: without an official girls' team, girls at your school wrestle as members of the boys' team, and while they can enter open tournaments, in Pennsylvania they cannot enter events held specifically for girls without affecting the boys' team competition points. The absence of a team is not neutral.

What the first programs did

The arc is the same in every state that has been through it, and it is visible in individual careers. Oregon sanctioned girls' wrestling in 2018, and Destiny Rodriguez wrestled boys in duals as a West Linn freshman in the same season she won an OSAA girls' state title, finishing as the first four-time girls' champion since sanctioning. Sage Mortimer wrestled boys in high school and then in the first Utah girls' state tournament. Sterling Dias wrestled boys for most of her youth career because Nevada had so few girls, and won a Nevada all-girls' state title in 2022.

Read those three together and the lesson for a coach is simple. The girls who will fill your first roster are already in your building. Some of them are in your room.

What coaches in girls' programs have said

Only what is on the record. In the NFHS's 2019 piece, Chad Vosburg, a wrestling coach at Severna Park in Maryland who co-hosted the state's first sanctioned girls' tournament, described three things his group did. They recruited mostly by word of mouth. They worked to get college coaches involved as an incentive for their wrestlers. And they worked to dispel stereotyped images of the sport and of cutting weight by promoting healthy eating, weightlifting and being an overall healthy athlete.

Vosburg also made the case for a separate girls' space in those words: he believes establishing girls' programs is valuable because it gives girls a separate space from boys to show their skills, and said that a lot of girls who start stick it out because it gives them a chance to shine at the end of the season. Those are his words, in 2019, and they are the only coaching claims on this page that come from a source rather than from us.

The weight rules you are responsible for

Two things a coach of girls has to have right, because they changed and because getting them wrong is not a technicality.

The floor is 19 percent. Effective with the 2026-27 season the NFHS raised the minimum body fat percentage for girls from 12 to 19 percent, in rules 1-5-1 and 1-5-2. Any calculator, app or spreadsheet running the boys' 7 percent number will hand a girl a target below the lowest weight she is legally allowed to compete at. The full mechanics are on the weight page and every level's classes are on weight classes.

The prohibited list is a rule, not a guideline. USA Wrestling's rule 4.9 prohibits drastic weight reduction and names the methods: rubber and plastic suits, hot rooms, hot showers, saunas, steam rooms, heating devices, diuretics, emetics, laxatives, excessive food or fluid restriction, and self-induced vomiting. A wrestler who uses them is subject to disqualification. A coach who suggests them is the reason parents leave the sport.

Coaching credentials

For the club side, USA Wrestling's requirements are explicit. A Wrestling Leader Membership is the starting point, and a background check and SafeSport training must be completed and passed before the membership is issued. Memberships run one or two years and each season runs September 1 to August 31.

Beyond that, USA Wrestling recommends the Copper level coaches certification for coaching athletes 12 and under, a four hour online course costing $50 with six modules covering the history and styles of wrestling, core Olympic values, the athlete development model, coaching and communication, risk management and safety, and nutrition and competition. Bronze level is recommended for coaching athletes 13 and up. Coaches certifications are valid for life. Regional and national events require Copper or Bronze depending on the age category coached, and state associations and tournament directors may set their own requirements on top.

Two things you can do this week

• Survey your coaches, and your building. Nebraska's path to a vote ran through 139 coaches answering a question. Your association will want the same evidence, and your administration will want to know how many girls in the school would sign up.
• Put your program in the directory. Families cannot find what is not listed, and the field they most want filled in is whether you run a girls' practice. Nobody publishes that anywhere, which is why we are collecting it.

Sources

All read on 2026-09-03.

• NFHS, State Associations Adding Girls Wrestling Tournaments (March 12, 2019). The Nebraska district vote and 139-coach survey, the Colorado two-year pilot, the North Carolina and Maryland invitationals, the NJSIAA participation figures and Bill Bruno quotes, the Missouri entries, and the Chad Vosburg quotes. The state counts in that piece are from 2019 and are not used here.
• NFHS, Led by Girls Flag Football and Girls Wrestling, High School Sports Participation Increases for Fifth Consecutive Year (August 27, 2026). The 2025-26 participation and school counts, the post-pandemic comparison, and the 40 associations figure.
• SanctionPA, Information for Athletic Directors and School Administrators. Club or varsity sponsorship, the PIAA portal mechanism, no minimum roster, shared coaches, practice time, equipment and transportation, and the competition-points point.
• Wrestle Like A Girl, Sanction NY one pager. The NYSPHSAA threshold of four schools in four sections, used as an example of an association gate. The page's own national counts are out of date.
• USA Wrestling, How to Become a Coach, and the Rule Book and Guide to Wrestling (PDF), section 4.9.
• NFHS, Adjustment in Minimum Body Fat Percentage for Females (April 16, 2026). Rules 1-5-1 and 1-5-2, 12 to 19 percent, effective 2026-27.