Iowa Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Fourth in our state-by-state preview series: Iowa, the sport's heartland — and the numbers do not flinch at the billing. Last season MatMetrics ingested 256,293 matches from 1,657 Iowa events involving 48,155 wrestlers, up from 204,087 matches and 42,711 wrestlers the year before — a 25 percent jump in match volume off a base that was already enormous. Here is the number that stops you: that is more wrestling than Texas, a state with roughly ten times Iowa's population. Nowhere else does the sport sit this deep in the culture. One structural quirk to know going in: Iowa runs its boys and girls under two different governing bodies — the IHSAA for boys, the IGHSAU for girls — and the IHSAA crowns its boys team champions twice each winter, once at the traditional, individual-bracket state tournament and again at a separate state dual-team tournament.

The fastest-growing piece is the girls side. 15,132 Iowa girls took the mat last season, up from 12,599 the year before — a 20 percent jump. The IGHSAU only sanctioned girls wrestling in 2022 and expanded it to two classes, 2A and 1A, in 2024-25, and the top of the board is already state-tournament tested. Waverly-Shell Rock's Amalia Djoumessi (70-5 in our records) is the highest-rated returning girl in the state after a 2A runner-up finish. In 1A, the two best wrestlers anchor the state's two dynasty programs: Denver's Violet Diaz (83-12), a two-time 1A champion chasing a three-peat, and Don Bosco's Erica Irvine (47-7), the reigning 1A champ and a top-30 girl in the national preseason rankings. Clarinda's Lily Weinreich rounds out the 1A names to watch.

The boys side is headlined by two of the best careers in the country. Don Bosco's Dawson Youngblut — a three-time state champion, Iowa Hawkeyes recruit, and the highest-rated returning boy in the state in our system — carries a 75-5 record into a bid for a fourth title. Denver's Gavin Landers is chasing something rarer still: a perfect finish. Landers is 155-0 across his high school career with three undefeated state titles, and a fourth unbeaten crown would put him in Iowa lore. In 3A, Indianola's Mac Crosson is a back-to-back champion who has yet to lose, ranked inside the national top five at his weight, while Southeast Polk's sophomore duo of Amir Newman-Winfrey (71-8, a national top-15 finish as a freshman) and the unbeaten Eddie Woody (40-0) gives the state's biggest class its most dangerous young tandem.

The team races, in both formats, ran through a familiar set of rooms. In 3A, Southeast Polk swept the winter — a third straight traditional team title on the strength of five individual champions, Newman-Winfrey and Woody among them, then a 57-11 rout of Indianola for the dual crown. 2A produced the season's best drama: Decorah and Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont shared the traditional team title as co-champions, then met again in the dual final, where EBF won its first-ever state dual title 37-33 on a pair of third-period comebacks. And 1A belongs to Don Bosco, which won the traditional title with six individual champions — its sixth straight and 16th overall — and edged Jesup 36-30 for the dual. On the girls side, Raccoon River Northwest repeated as 2A champion with 148½ points and Denver took 1A, giving the Cyclones a team trophy to go with Landers and Diaz.

What to watch when the season opens: two four-title chases at the top of the boys brackets — Youngblut going for his fourth, and Landers going for a fourth without a loss — and a Don Bosco-versus-Denver throughline that runs through both genders, since each program returns a champion-level boy and girl. In the team races, the question in 3A is whether anyone can lay a glove on Southeast Polk, which swept both formats, and in 2A whether the EBF-Decorah rivalry that produced a shared title and a four-point dual final tilts decisively one way. The girls races, in only their second two-class season, are the ones most likely to be reshaped by the sport's sheer rate of growth.

The honest caveat we attach to every data piece matters more in Iowa than anywhere, because no state feeds our database more youth and club volume. Our October cleanup pulled youth and out-of-state results off the high school boards, but a handful of the biggest names still carry a split profile — Gavin Landers among them, whose career record reads far lighter in our system than his 155-0 reality because his results are divided across separate registrations. The accomplishments above are the verified ones; where our win-loss or rating looks off, that is the bookkeeping catching up, and the report tools on every profile come straight to us. As always, weights listed are where each wrestler last competed — expect some to move by the time the season opens.

Search any Iowa 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 through the fall — the series rolls on.