Women's Wrestling Club

The sport

High school girls' wrestling, state by state

88,771 girls wrestled for their high schools in 2025-26, at 8,853 schools. That is 14,707 more than 2024-25, a rise of 19.9 percent in one season, and it makes wrestling the tenth largest girls' sport in the country. 49 of 51 jurisdictions now run a girls' state championship.

By Joe Spisak, Pennsylvania state champion and 4x NCAA qualifier at Virginia · Published September 3, 2026

Every state

Since is the year the association held its first girls' state championship, not the year it voted to sanction one. The two differ in most states, usually by a season and in Indiana by eight, and the year of the meet is the one that matters to the girls who wrestled it.

StateAssociationSinceFormat2025-26
AlabamaAHSAA2021Inside the state meet1,150
AlaskaASAA2014Inside the state meet507
ArizonaAIA2019Separate1,843
ArkansasArkansas Activities Association2020Inside the state meet845
CaliforniaCIF2011Inside the state meet10,204
ColoradoCHSAA2021Inside the state meet1,751
ConnecticutCIAC2020Inside the state meet449
DelawareDIAAscheduledSeparate291
District of ColumbiaDCSAAnoNone30
FloridaFHSAA2022Separate2,328
GeorgiaGHSA2019Separate2,472
HawaiiHHSAA1998Inside the state meet653
IdahoIHSAA (Idaho)2022Inside the state meet860
IllinoisIHSA2022Separate3,396
IndianaIHSAA (Indiana)2025Separate2,719
IowaIGHSAU2023Separate3,468
KansasKSHSAA2020Inside the state meet2,887
KentuckyKHSAA2024Inside the state meet1,327
LouisianaLHSAA2025Inside the state meet425
MaineMPA2019Separate202
MarylandMPSSAA2020Inside the state meet1,423
MassachusettsMIAA2019Inside the state meet479
MichiganMHSAA2022Inside the state meet1,783
MinnesotaMSHSL2022Inside the state meet1,810
MississippiMHSAAnot recordedInside the state meet87
MissouriMSHSAA2019Separate3,135
MontanaMHSA2021Inside the state meet792
NebraskaNSAA2022Separate2,420
NevadaNIAAscheduledInside the state meet635
New HampshireNHIAA2023Separate104
New JerseyNJSIAA2019Inside the state meet2,822
New MexicoNMAA2020Inside the state meet853
New YorkNYSPHSAA2025Separate1,971
North CarolinaNCHSAA2024Inside the state meet2,246
North DakotaNDHSAA2022Inside the state meet491
OhioOHSAA2023Inside the state meet3,290
OklahomaOSSAA2021Inside the state meet1,933
OregonOSAA2019Inside the state meet2,060
PennsylvaniaPIAA2024Inside the state meet3,080
Rhode IslandRIIL2024Inside the state meet84
South CarolinaSCHSL2025Separate749
South DakotaSDHSAA2021Inside the state meet974
TennesseeTSSAA2015Inside the state meet1,101
TexasUIL1999Inside the state meet7,057
UtahUHSAA2021Inside the state meet1,584
VermontVPAnoNone30
VirginiaVHSL2026Separate1,359
WashingtonWIAA2007Inside the state meet4,111
West VirginiaWVSSACscheduledSeparate335
WisconsinWIAA (Wisconsin)2022Inside the state meet1,557
WyomingWHSAA2023Inside the state meet609

scheduled in the Since column means the association has approved a girls' championship and has not yet wrestled the first one. not recorded means girls' brackets are wrestled but the association publishes no record naming a first year. no means it runs none. Participation is the NFHS High School Athletics Participation Survey, girls' wrestling column; a jurisdiction that did not report shows not reported rather than a zero.

Where it started

Hawaii crowned the first girls' state champions in 1998, a year before Texas and nine before Washington, which held invitationals from 2004 and made them championships in 2007. Everything after that is the last few years: 39 of the 45 jurisdictions that have crowned girls' state champions did it for the first time in 2019 or later.

Hawaii, Texas, Washington

Where the girls are

The five largest states for girls' wrestling in 2025-26, by the survey's own count.

The four gaps, named

3 jurisdictions have sanctioned a girls' championship they have not yet wrestled. Delaware, Nevada and West Virginia. Each state page says when the first one is scheduled and stops there, because a founding year for a meet that has not happened is a fiction.

2 run no girls' championship at all. the District of Columbia and Vermont. Both pages say what exists instead: the District holds an invitational whose field is mostly out of state, and Vermont wrestles one coed tournament in the boys' weight classes.

13 associations have not published which weight classes their girls wrestle, or publish a set that matches none of the three the NFHS offers. Connecticut adds a 285 to the 12 class set, New York adds a 94, North Dakota tops its 13 out at 250. Those pages print no table and say why. A girl handed a weight class her state does not wrestle is worse off than a girl handed nothing, which is the rule the whole weight classes page is built on.

Mississippi wrestles girls' brackets and keeps no record of them. The association recognizes girls' wrestling in its handbook and ran full girls' brackets at the last state meet, but publishes no record book and no past champions, so no year here can be called the first.

Where these numbers come from

Participation is the NFHS High School Athletics Participation Survey, the census every state association files. Each state row links the survey PDF its numbers were read from, and the rows sum to the survey's own national totals, which is asserted in the test suite so a hand edit that drifts fails the build.

Sanctioning, format, weight classes and the rule for a girl at a school with no team were read off each association's own pages, or off a USA Wrestling or NFHS milestone release where the association keeps no record. Every one of those is linked on the state page with the date it was read, which for this pass was 2026-09-03. Where we could not establish a fact, the page says so and prints nothing, because a missing number beats a wrong one.

Next: the state championship calendar has the dates and qualifying path for 49 series, the club directory covers the rooms that train girls when school is out of season, and the college directory is where the good ones go after.

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