Later this winter, New Hampshire will host the first-ever Girls State Championship for wrestling – a monumental step forward for the sport around the state.
In mid-November, the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) announced that it would hold the event concurrently with the State Meet of Champions, on Feb. 25, 2023. The announcement comes at a time when wrestling is struggling to keep pace with other sports.
Just nine years ago, the International Olympic Committee announced that wrestling would not be part of the 2020 Olympics. Though it was ultimately voted back in for the 2020 and 2024 games, it’s been an uneasy ride.
On the boys’ side at the high school level, the sport has been in decline: participation in wrestling has dropped from nearly 275,000 for the 2010-11 school year to just over 230,000 for 2021-22, according to national statistics. By contrast, girls’ participation has skyrocketed from 7,300 in 2010-11 to nearly 32,000 last year.
It’s the explosion in girls’ wrestling that’s arguably saved the sport, and the NHIAA’s move to hold this girls’-specific championship validates this growth.
“Across the country, girls’ wrestling is on a huge growth spurt,” said Brock Hoffman, the former Bow High School wrestling coach who now leads the area’s youth program, the Bow Brawlers. “It’s been one of the fastest-growing sports in America.”
Anna Krause, one of Hoffman’s former wrestlers who graduated from Bow in 2021, was an All-American at Nationals in Fargo, North Dakota, in 2017 and participated in the World Team Trials that same year. She also currently helps Hoffman with the Bow Brawlers, so she’s seen the growth of girls wrestling firsthand.
“I definitely have seen more girls starting in kindergarten or really young in elementary school, which is pretty cool,” she said. “I think there were like two or three girls throughout the whole state the year that I wrestled for the high school.”
Now, she estimates that there are more than 10.
Bill Chavanelle, the new Bow wrestling coach, said that there are about 12 to 15 female wrestlers in the Bow youth program alone, so the high school numbers will likely continue to grow substantially in the coming years.
“It wasn’t too long ago where the Olympic committee was going to take wrestling out of the Olympics,” he said. “Well now, wrestling’s not gonna go anywhere.”
It’s been quite the turnaround from wrestling being slashed from the Olympics to states like New Hampshire adding a girls’ wrestling event. On a national scale, Hoffman looks at Helen Maroulis’ gold medal performance in the 2016 Olympics as a pivot point.
Maroulis became the first American to take home gold in a women’s wrestling event at the Olympics after beating Saori Yoshida of Japan.
That triumph on the global stage also overlapped with when Hoffman was training Krause for a national competition.
“The increase in what I saw from the year prior in Texas at Nationals to the year after Helen Maroulis won a gold medal was a significant increase,” Hoffman said. “I feel like that just showed our country that this sport is capable for girls, and they can be successful at it.”
Right now, all high school wrestling teams in New Hampshire are co-ed – there still aren’t enough girls to break into separate teams. But splitting the teams by gender is certainly a long-term goal that the addition of the NHIAA-sanctioned championship might bring the sport closer to.
“I definitely think it’s important for the growth of women’s wrestling to have that opportunity to potentially have separate teams,” Krause said. “Wrestling with girls is a lot different than wrestling with boys, so I think it would provide a good opportunity for girls to be able to get into college programs.”
Nick Zeras, the assistant coach for Concord wrestling and New Hampshire director for Team U.S.A. Wrestling, echoed that sentiment.
“More and more colleges are putting in girls’ teams,” he said. “When you do get to the high school level, sometimes it is harder and harder for some of the girls to compete with some of the boys depending on the weight classes and everything like that.”
The growth at the high school level hasn’t exploded everywhere, though. In Concord, Zeras said the increase at the middle school level has been significant, but it hasn’t translated to the high schools. Retention is the big issue. And, perhaps, so is the lack of opportunity for girls to wrestle against other girls.
The Concord High School wrestling team enters the season with a roster of 44 kids, but just one girl: freshman Madison Beauregard.
She started wrestling four years ago and said that to her, it doesn’t make a difference whether she wrestles against boys or girls. As the only girl on this year’s team, she doesn’t really have a choice anyway. She relishes the challenge.
Her favorite part of wrestling is quite simple: “The look after I beat a boy,” she said.
In eighth grade last year at Rundlett, Beauregard was supposed to have the opportunity to wrestle against other girls and have it count toward her team’s total at the state meet, but there was no one in her weight class. She was back to wrestling against boys.
But the continued expansion of girls’ wrestling through the NHIAA should bode well for Beauregard and other female wrestlers around the state in the future.
“It’s exciting,” Sarah Beauregard, Madison’s mom, said. “She really pushes herself and really wants to be better. She wants to get stronger, (and) she’s very goal-oriented, so it’s nice to see her really try and get out there.”
The NHIAA’s decision to hold the girls’ event doesn’t come without some drawbacks. Because the championship is being held at the same time as the State Meet of Champions – when wrestlers compete for their high schools – girls will only be allowed to participate in one of the two events.
“The way that they’re orchestrating it and forcing the girls to choose between wrestling other girls or wrestling for their team at the end for states is not as productive as I think it could be,” Hoffman said. “You’re asking a girl who’s been a part of her team all year to now ditch her team to try to blaze this trail for other girls.”
Added Krause: “You’ll see some division there with girls who are maybe on a smaller school team, they’re gonna stay on the varsity (team), and you won’t see those numbers at the girls’ states. … You won’t have an accurate representation of what women’s wrestling is looking like for the high schools in New Hampshire.”
Zeras doesn’t see it having too much of a negative impact. One or two female wrestlers might be impacted, but he said the NHIAA views the State Meet of Champions more as an individual event than a team event.
The NHIAA also noted in a press release that the hope is to make the Girls State Championship a standalone event in the future.
Either way, while there will assuredly still be kinks to work out as the sport continues to grow throughout the state, the addition of the Girls State Championship in February will surely place a more emphasized spotlight on girls’ wrestling in New Hampshire.
“It’s been awesome to be a part of, especially from the beginning,” Hoffman said. “Like, finally everyone’s catching up to what a great experience this is. Because to me, coach ing high-level girls is just as much fun – if not more fun – than coaching some of the guys.”