Staff photo / Preston Byers Poland’s Ella Thomas gets set to face Brianne Graves of Oak Hills in the OHSAA girls 100-pound state wrestling championship semifinal in Columbus on Saturday.

COLUMBUS — For the second straight year, the Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) sponsored the girls state wrestling tournament, hosting the event at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus, where it ran simultaneously with the 87th annual boys tournament.

Ohio is just one of several states to recently give its stamp of approval on girls wrestling, which has become one of the fastest-growing sports in the country. The National Federation of High Schools (NFHS) said in September that high school girls wrestling participants had increased by 55% year-over-year and had multiplied by nearly five times in the last decade.

“It almost feels like it’s doubling every year. When we started, we’d see pretty much the same girls all the time,” Howland assistant wrestling coach Mike Burns said. “It’s pretty wild to see where it’s going. It’s just going to continue to grow more, and more people are going to come here and learn about it. It’s just gonna keep growing to be as big as the boys here.”

Sloane McNally, a state qualifier in the 105-pound girls division from Boardman, said she has personally seen the expansion of girls wrestling.

“It’s changed a lot. We went from having almost no girls — maybe like a couple girls in your weight class, if you were lucky — to [a point that] we had to add a pre-regionals just to qualify for state, so it’s changed a lot. It’s grown a lot,” McNally said.

When Boardman head coach Hadi Hadi began coaching more than 30 years ago, girls wrestled, but there just weren’t very many of them. With no girls-only division or tournaments, many shied away from the sport due to the inevitability of wrestling boys.

Hadi said although that is not really an issue anymore, most parents and kids still do not know.

“It’s not publicized enough. There’s that misconception that girls have to wrestle boys. Parents don’t want that, I know that for a fact, and if I’m a girl and I weigh 150 pounds, it’s probably intimidating to wrestle boys,” Hadi said. “Coaches have to do their part promoting… Let the girls in your school district know, ‘We have a team and you only have to compete against girls.'”

McNally agreed that the prospect of wrestling teenage boys can be daunting.

“It was very much intimidating, especially a lot more in high school because, you know, most of the guys hit puberty at that point, and I’m just getting dogged on,” McNally said.

Educating parents and their children about the realities of the sport is the first step, but there is still work to do in convincing teenage girls to join a wrestling team, especially if they do not have prior experience with the sport.

Unlike the many boys and girls who followed their father or older brother into the sport, someone like McNally turned to wrestling in seventh grade because other sports didn’t work out as well as she hoped.

“Tried out for volleyball, didn’t make it. Tried out for basketball, didn’t make it. Heard this sport called wrestling, I was like, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’ First practice ever, got a bloody nose and I said, ‘Yeah, I like this sport.'”

Hadi said part of the reason girls wrestling has become increasingly more popular is that it is becoming a legitimate alternative for prospective winter sport athletes, like McNally.

“Let’s rewind to pre-girls wrestling; come winter, there was just basketball. For boys, there was an alternative — there was wrestling,” Hadi said. “If you didn’t make the girls basketball team, you were kind of done unless you were doing some type of club sport. That opportunity now is available to girls.”

There are those like McNally, and then there is someone like Madison Burns of Howland, who placed fifth at the state tournament Sunday, or Boardman native Lexi Beadle, whose respective fathers inspired them to become a wrestler.

Mike Burns said his daughter approached him to introduce her to the sport, much to his surprise.

“She just came up to me one day when I was sitting there and she said, ‘I want to wrestle.’ I said, ‘Huh?,'” Mike said.

Beadle is a three-time state placer who transferred from Boardman to SPIRE Academy in Geneva for her senior season. The daughter of Poland head coach Jordan Beadle and assistant coach Courtney Beadle, she grew up surrounded by the sport, so it was only natural for her to do it herself.

“She’s a big daddy’s girl,” Courtney said. “He wrestled, his brothers wrestled, his family and everything. So she wanted to be a little bit like daddy and that’s kind of how it progressed. I fought it for a little bit because she was the only girl and I didn’t know how their coaches or other wrestlers would take it.”

While there are more girls hitting the mats every year, there is still work to do.

McNally suggested the OHSAA go “full blast” by adding divisions to girls wrestling; Ohio currently has a single division for all girls regardless of school size, while there are three divisions for boys.

As more girls-only tournaments are added to the schedule, Hadi also said he would like to see schools establish girls wrestling coaching staffs. More wrestlers and events run the risk of overburdening the coaches who already travel extensively with teams that greatly outnumber them.

Hadi said he plans to add at least one more coach and “aggressively promote” the girls team at Boardman. McNally also said she will return to help coach the Spartans’ program after graduating this spring.

All in the hopes of continuing to grow the sport.

Have an interesting story? Contact Preston Byers by email at pbyers@tribtoday.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @PresByers.