Florida Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Eighteenth in our state-by-state preview series: Florida, where the girls are already practicing — their season opened November 2, a week before the boys — and the winter runs through Kissimmee twice: the official Dual Team State Championships at Osceola High School January 22-23, and the individual-bracket state championships at Silver Spurs Arena March 4-6, boys and girls together. The FHSAA runs boys wrestling in three enrollment classes and the girls in a single statewide class across 365 teams, and this season brings a format change — the dual tournament's district and regional rounds collapse into one qualifying weekend on January 15-16. Last season MatMetrics ingested 161,482 matches from 929 Florida events involving 22,343 wrestlers, with girls at about 24% of the field. Florida sanctioned girls wrestling in 2021-22, among the earlier states, and while its raw girls numbers sit around tenth nationally, its talent pipeline punches far above that — more on Fargo below.

The team story is South Dade, in a new era. The Homestead program won its thirteenth consecutive state tournament in March — every year since 2014, an FHSAA record — and swept the 3A dual title 49-21 over Orlando's Freedom in the same season, all in year one under Humberto Reyna, who took over when hall-of-fame coach Victor Balmeceda retired. Lake Gibson did its own double in 2A, taking the dual final 39-16 over Somerset Academy and then the closest tournament race in the state, six points over Somerset with Tampa Jesuit two back. Mater Lakes Academy swept 1A — duals and tournament — for the second straight year. And on the girls side, Orlando's Freedom became the sport's first two-time team champion, winning its 2026 title without a single individual champion, on depth alone.

The boys headliner is chasing history nobody in Florida has touched. South Dade's Jovani Solis won his fourth state title in March — and he's still a junior, having won his first as a seventh grader. Two more wins would make him Florida's first six-time champion. Miami Southridge's Jovanni Tovar, a three-time champion and the state's only pound-for-pound top-20 wrestler nationally, is on the same arc one title behind. Cardinal Gibbons' Peter Mocco — younger brother of four-timer Michael Mocco, now at Iowa — returns a 58-2 champion ranked in the national top 10 at 215, Charlotte's three-time champion Jake Austin moves up to 157, and the returning champion class runs deep: Florida High's Jasper Croom (50-0), South Dade's two-time champion Armand Williams, Tampa Jesuit's Kawayran Vazquez, Miami Southridge's Cristhian Soto, Lake Gibson's Jeremiah Chavis, and Zephyrhills Christian's Kyle Gallo, a national top-15 wrestler at 190. One asterisk on the Florida map: Lake Highland Prep — back-to-back National Prep champion and No. 2 in the final national team rankings — left the FHSAA in 2020 and wrestles a national schedule, so its Cornell- and Iowa-bound senior core, led by Lucas Boe, chases hardware at Lehigh, not Kissimmee.

The girls side is where Florida's Fargo summer still echoes. Miami Southridge's Abigail Gonzalez won the Fargo Junior freestyle title at 115 and was named Most Outstanding Wrestler — she enters the winter ranked at the top of the country at her weight. Mater Lakes' Paola Perez, a champion as a freshman and a Fargo placer, and teammate Arianna Ruiz give the 1A power a girls core too; Brandon's Grace Jawulski, Wakulla's Kendal Haynie, South Dade's Kenzie Barrett, Florida Christian's Zoe Delgado, Douglas' Zeinab Mourad, and Sunlake's Ennis Coakley — Fargo All-Americans and returning champions nearly all — make this one of the youngest elite girls classes in the country. The graduations were real: three-time champion Ailee Briggs and two-timers Willow White and Camdyn Elliott all finished their runs. And the youngest storyline might be the best one: Florida Christian's Melissa Gallo won a state title last March as a seventh grader.

Looking ahead, Fargo set the stakes: Florida crowned three Junior freestyle national champions in one summer for the first time ever — with a state-record nine Junior All-Americans — and two of the three (Tyler Dekraker and Charlie DeSena, both Lake Highland) have since graduated, which tells you how fast this pipeline moves. The season questions: can anyone in 3A get within 40 points of South Dade; does 2A's three-way scrum (Lake Gibson, Somerset, Jesuit, with Charlotte lurking) produce the state's best race again; and how far can Solis and Tovar carry the six-title and five-title chases before they collide with the record books. The Knockout Christmas Classic at Silver Spurs on December 18-19 — sixty-plus teams from nine states — will give the first real answers.

The honest caveat, and Florida's was the most instructive yet: our raw numbers said Florida lost two-thirds of its wrestlers year over year — it didn't. Our 2024-25 Florida data came through an older pipeline that created separate wrestler profiles per event; the current scraper resolves identities globally, so the counts aren't comparable and we've quoted this season's clean figures only. The audit also caught an Illinois school (a four-time-title contender's, no less) tagged as Florida in our database, two boys state champions filed in our girls rankings — both now locked to the correct gender — a spelling-variant duplicate of one of the state's top-rated wrestlers, and Lake Highland Prep split across two team rows. All fixed or flagged this week. As always: weights listed are last-competed and wrestlers often move up a class, and career records on our site aggregate club and offseason matches, so they run higher than official single-season marks.

Search any Florida wrestler, team, or event above to see where they stand heading into the winter, or pull up the state rankings and sort by weight class. One state a day — the series rolls on.