High school · Arizona
Arizona high school girls' wrestling
AIA has crowned girls' state champions in Arizona since 2019. 1,843 girls wrestled here in 2025-26, at 280 schools.
By Joe Spisak, Pennsylvania state champion and 4x NCAA qualifier at Virginia · Published September 3, 2026
The association
Sanctioned
- Association
- AIA
- Girls' championship
- Yes, first held in 2019
- Format
- A separate girls' championship, its own event
- Source
- azpreps365.com, read 2026-09-03
What the record shows
The AIA added girls wrestling for 2018-19 as an emerging sport and crowned individual state champions in February 2019 in ten weight classes; the AIA Executive Board made girls wrestling a full team sport in April 2020.
The 2026-27 Arizona championship carries the dates, the venue, and the qualifying path.
How many girls wrestle in Arizona
The NFHS High School Athletics Participation Survey, girls' wrestling column. Every number here is the survey's own; nothing is estimated or carried forward.
That is 166 more girls than 2024-25, up 9.9 percent.
Weight classes
AIA uses the NFHS 12 class girls' set. The NFHS offers three, and a state association picks one and cannot switch mid-season.
- 100
- 107
- 114
- 120
- 126
- 132
- 138
- 145
- 152
- 165
- 185
- 235
Scratch weights, in pounds. Most associations add a growth allowance partway through the season, so a bracket in February may read two pounds higher than this. Read off aiaonline.org on 2026-09-03. Every set at every level puts this beside the NCAA, NAIA and international weights.
What to do if your school has no girls' team
We found no published AIA rule covering a girl whose school has no girls' team. That is not the same as a ban, and it usually means the answer is local rather than statewide.
The general path, in the order that works: ask the athletic director first, in writing, whether the school will enter you and under what rule. Most schools have never been asked, and the answer to a written question goes on the record in a way a hallway conversation does not. If the school will not enter you, ask AIA directly what a student in your position may do; associations answer these, and the answer is the one that binds your school.
Train while you sort it out. A club room is where most girls in a state without a school team actually wrestle, and club season runs when the school season does not. The clubs in Arizona are listed by city, with the girls' rooms and girls' practices flagged where the club says so.
Where it goes next
The state final is not the end of the line. These are the two places a Arizona wrestler goes from here.
College in the state
No college in Arizona sponsors women's wrestling yet. The national directory runs to hundreds of programs and grows every season.
Wrestlers from Arizona
2 women in the record we keep grew up here. Their careers started in a room like the one down the road.
Before the season starts
A girl's legal minimum wrestling weight is built on the 19 percent body fat floor the NFHS sets for girls, not the boys' 7 percent. That is roughly sixteen pounds of difference for a fifteen year old, and every app built on the boys' number gets it wrong. How making weight works covers certification and what your state enforces at the scale.
This page was read on 2026-09-03, off AIA's own pages and the NFHS participation survey. Associations change rules in the spring and post the new ones late; the links here go to the page that will carry the change first.
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