Nearly One in Four: High School Wrestling Participation 2025-2026
The NFHS released its high school sports participation data for 2025-2026. Total wrestling participation was 384,030, an all-time record and 2.6% growth over the previous survey year. Total high school sports participation grew 1.8%, so wrestling again outpaced the field — though by a narrower margin than in any of the last three years.
Underneath the record is a split.
Boys wrestling declined for the first time since the sport started climbing out of the pandemic, down 1.7% to 295,259. Boys programs went the other way, adding 303 to reach 11,829. More rooms, fewer bodies in them: the average boys team fell to 25.0 wrestlers from 26.1.
Girls wrestling added 14,707 participants, growth of 19.9%, to reach 88,771 across 8,853 programs. Girls accounted for every bit of wrestling’s net growth this year and then some. Nearly one in four high school wrestlers was a girl in 2025-2026. Three years ago it was one in six.
The number we have watched most closely finally moved. Average girls team size reached 10.0 wrestlers, the first double-digit reading in the survey and up from 7.6 in 2022-2023. In 2023 we noted that at then-current growth rates the average girls team would not fill a 14-weight-class lineup for another twenty years. At the pace of the last three years it is closer to five.
Wrestling’s share of all high school sports participants rose again, from 4.5% to 4.6%. Boys wrestling accounts for 6.2% of all boys participation; girls wrestling for 2.4% of all girls participation.
Program counts are converging. In Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota and Rhode Island, the number of girls programs and the number of boys programs is now identical.
Click any chart to enlarge.
Number of wrestling programs
Number of wrestlers
Wrestlers per team
Wrestling share of high school sports
Take a look at the data and draw your own conclusions about the health of high school wrestling.
A note on the numbers. Figures here come from the NFHS participation dashboard, which reports 53 survey years back to 1971-1972. No survey was conducted for 2019-2020 or 2020-2021, which is why the lines break. The NFHS has also revised some prior-year figures since we last wrote about this: 2022-2023 wrestling now reads 309,447, where the survey published at the time showed 305,593. Three states — Connecticut, Massachusetts and Minnesota — report girls wrestlers but no separate girls programs, so the girls program count is conservative.