Indiana Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Twenty-second in our state-by-state preview series: Indiana, the other great single-class state — every school in one tournament, four rounds deep: thirty-two sectionals into sixteen regionals into the four famous semi-states at East Chicago, Fort Wayne, New Castle, and Evansville, finishing at the state finals February 19-20. The team side belongs to the coaches association, whose four-class Team State duals hit Franklin Community on January 9 — and the girls, sanctioned in 2024 as the forty-sixth state, are already two championships deep with their own January series. Last season MatMetrics ingested 132,737 matches from 728 Indiana events involving 30,425 wrestlers — and the girls share is the stat to watch: 29% of the field, among the strongest we've measured in this series, with official participation up 22% to about 2,700.

February's team race came down to the last final of the night. Center Grove entered with three straight runner-up finishes; it left with its first championship ever, 137 to Brownsburg's 133.5, sealed when Sean Breedlove beat Peyton Hornsby's teammate-in-arms rival at 175 to finish 38-0. Brownsburg — whose 2025 title run set the all-time points record with seven champions — was denied the three-peat by three and a half points. At the coaches' Team State in January, Crown Point edged Brownsburg 34-32 in the 4A final, Franklin Community won its first 3A dual title in a decade, Garrett went back-to-back in 2A, and North Miami beat Adams Central in consecutive 1A finals. The girls team race delivered the best story of the winter: Whiteland's championship was the first state title in the school's history — in any sport.

The returning class is built around a run at history. Indiana has crowned exactly eleven four-time champions in a century of the single-class tournament — and four juniors are two titles in: Brownsburg's Traevon Ducking and Case Bell, New Prairie's MJ Staples (84-0, never beaten in high school), and Lowell's Kameron Hazelett at heavyweight. Behind the four-timer watch is the country's deepest single-weight logjam: three Hoosiers in the national top six around 144-150 — Lowell's Cornell-bound champion Evan Stanley, Delta's Jensen Boyd, and Brownsburg's champion Braylon Reynolds, a Fargo runner-up — plus Center Grove's Peyton Hornsby, No. 2 in the country at 150 and committed to Indiana. Boonville's Sam Howard won a Fargo Junior national title at 215, Mater Dei's Caleb Schaefer carries the state's most storied small-school room (thirteen team titles in a fully single-class state), and Westfield's Connor Maddox and Crown Point's Ceasar Salas return titles as juniors. One empty chair: Crown Point's Penn State-bound champion Clinton Shepherd is skipping his senior season to train in Happy Valley.

The girls side returns a national No. 2 with a Fargo crown. Pendleton Heights senior Maddie Marsh — a two-time undefeated state champion at 140 — won the Fargo Junior freestyle national title this summer and leads the preseason rankings at her weight; her stylistic opposite is North Central's Racheal Adolphe, a former champion and Fargo 16U winner chasing redemption after being pinned in last year's final by a graduated senior. Indian Creek's two-time champion Ella Neibert, Crown Point's two-time champion Ava Strayer — still only a sophomore — Whiteland's champions Kaitlynn Fouty and Mikayla Perkins, Hobart's Corabella Wesley (a 42-0 champion as a freshman), and Columbus East's Annabelle Redman give Indiana one of the youngest elite girls cores anywhere. The graduations were historic: Kendall Moe and Aleksandra Bastaic both left as four-time champions across the sport's club-to-sanctioned transition.

Looking ahead, the Center Grove–Brownsburg rematch headlines everything — the two rooms are tied for the most nationally ranked wrestlers in the preseason polls, and the margin last February was one swing. Crown Point holds the dual crown and lurks in both races even without Shepherd. The four-timer chases are a three-year story just starting its second act, the 144-pound family feud will probably decide the team race by itself, and Fargo already told us the trajectory: a state-record eight Junior freestyle All-Americans for the boys and two girls champions — Marsh and 235-pounder Aubrey Bartkowiak — with the girls' best-ever national team finish. Girls practice is already underway; the boys start November 16.

The honest caveat, and Indiana's audit was mid-pack: a Florida three-time champion we've featured in this series was sitting on Indiana's board — his duplicate profile had been attached to Indiana's Southridge High School purely on the school-name match with his Miami school; now linked and cleared. Eight more duplicate profiles were linked for wrestlers named here, and one returning girls champion's profile was found canonical-linked to a Pennsylvania wrestler — the same false-merge pattern we broke for a New Jersey star last week — and has been unlinked. A college program and several club-labeled rows pad the raw girls board, so the names above come from verified championship results. 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 Indiana 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.