Photos: Why is girls' high school wrestling on the rise?
SOURCE: www.espn.com
April 12, 2019

 


On an unseasonably warm February morning in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as hundreds of elementary and middle school boys were grappling one another, 87 girls from 55 high schools found their way to the mats for North Carolina's first official high school girls' wrestling invitational contest.

The state is one of many experiencing a boom in female wrestlers. For years, girls around the country were folded into boys' programs. But since 2001, the number of girls in high school wrestling has soared from 3,405 to nearly 17,000, buoyed by the introduction of women to Olympic wrestling in 2004 and the rise of MMA, a sport dominated by strong wrestlers. In the past year, six states have sanctioned the sport, making it one of the nation's fastest-growing high school girls' programs.





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