Scott Donalson

Scott Donalson is the founder of MatMetrics and the person behind everything on this site — the scrapers that collect match results, the database that holds 1.8 million wrestler records and 5.5 million matches, the Glicko-2 rating engine that powers the rankings, and the articles published under this byline.

He came to wrestling the way a lot of analysts come to their sport: as a parent in the stands, trying to answer practical questions. Who is this kid my son is wrestling next? How good is that team across the bracket? Why does one 30-5 record mean something completely different from another? The tools that existed were slow, scattered, or shallow, so he started building his own — first a spreadsheet, then a database, then MatMetrics.

Professionally, Scott is a software developer, and MatMetrics is a production software project as much as a wrestling site: a Python scraping pipeline that reconciles results from multiple sources, a Java calculation engine that recomputes ratings, rankings, and career statistics after every event, and the site you are reading. When the numbers in an article look unusually specific — match counts, technical-fall rates, rating changes — it is because they come straight out of that database, not from a press release.

His tournament coverage focuses on the youth and high school freestyle, Greco-Roman, and folkstyle circuits — regional championships, the road to Fargo, and the state tournaments where most wrestling careers are actually made. If you spot an error in an article or in the data, he wants to hear about it: [email protected].

Curious how the numbers work? Start with the Glicko-2 ratings explainer or the Learn hub.