Arkansas Wrestling 2026-27: The Wrestlers, Weights, and Teams to Watch

This is the first stop in a state-by-state tour of the 2026-27 folkstyle season, and we are starting at home in Arkansas. The Natural State opens on the mat in November and runs through the classification state tournaments in February, and while the 2026-27 picture is still forming, last season's results already tell you where the talent and the team strength sit. Here is what to watch — and how to follow it, weight by weight, on MatMetrics all winter.

Start with the wrestlers who set the pace. In the 6A ranks, Bentonville's Zach Donalson was as dominant as anyone in the state, piling up a 47-1 record at 120 pounds, while teammate Camden Runnels held down 113 at 36-10 — a lightweight core that makes Bentonville dangerous every time it steps on the mat. Har-Ber's Daxton Kline battled a brutal schedule to 40-13 at 132, and up top the heavyweight and upper-weight picture ran through Lake Hamilton's David Dalton (23-2 at 285) and Little Rock Christian's Gideon Carlisle (27-2 at 190), two of the most efficient records in the state.

The best individual story last season, though, might have been Harrisburg. The program stacked ranked wrestlers across the middle and upper weights — Trayson Truesdell (41-6 at 138), Brody Buzzard (41-7 at 215), and Landon Hill (28-7 at 126) — a haul that punches well above the school's size and makes Harrisburg a name to watch on the individual side no matter the classification. When a smaller program puts three wrestlers in the 40-win and ranked conversation, that is exactly the kind of signal the rankings are built to surface.

On the team side, the 6A race remains the deepest in the state. Cabot, Bentonville, Har-Ber, Conway, and Rogers Heritage anchor MatMetrics' Arkansas team power rankings, which score programs from their duals and individual results within the state and classification. The question for 2026-27 is the usual one — who reloads and who takes a step back — and the team rankings will start answering it the moment duals season opens, long before the state bracket is seeded.

A note on how to read all of this: these are last season's numbers, so the 2026-27 question at every weight is who is back and who has moved on. That is the fun of the preseason — use the rankings to see where each weight stood, then watch through November and December as the returning wrestlers re-establish their ratings and the newcomers force their way in. Sort the Arkansas rankings by weight class, keep an eye on the rating deviation as match counts grow, and use the common-opponent tool to weigh two contenders who have not met.

One honest caveat, the same one we flag everywhere: Arkansas, like every state, still has some bookkeeping catching up — a wrestler who competes for both a club and a school can occasionally show up under more than one profile, and a handful of team names still need merging. We spent the offseason merging tens of thousands of duplicates and tightening state, gender, and age data, but if a name or a record looks off, that is usually why; the underlying results are real. We would rather tell you that than pretend the data is perfect.

That is Arkansas. For the big picture on everything MatMetrics tracks this winter, see our 2026-27 season preview and our scouting guide — and check back as we work through the rest of the states, one a day, in the run-up to the season. Search any Arkansas wrestler or team above to see where they stand heading into 2026-27.