Kansas Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Eleventh in our state-by-state preview series: Kansas, where the season runs through four classes and, increasingly, through the girls brackets. Last season MatMetrics ingested 209,434 matches from 1,271 Kansas events involving 33,551 wrestlers, up from 180,616 matches and 29,346 wrestlers the year before. Girls made up nearly 38% of those wrestlers — among the highest shares of any state we cover. KSHSAA runs both boys and girls in four postseason classes — 6A, 5A, 4A, and 3-1A — and, unusually, splits the state championships across four arenas by class: Overland Park (6A), Park City (5A), Salina (4A), and Fort Hays State in Hays (3-1A). Kansas was an early mover on the girls side, crowning its first girls state champion in 2020 and expanding the girls bracket to the full four-class structure in 2024-25. The 2027 championships are set for February 26-27; practices open November 16.

Two team stories defined February. In Class 6A, Maize won the program's first big-class title under first-year coach Tyler Gonzales and did it with authority — four individual champions and a Class 6A-record 237 points. In Class 3-1A, Hoxie stretched one of the sport's quietest dynasties to a sixth straight title with a startlingly young lineup, while Basehor-Linwood pulled off a sweep no Kansas school had managed, winning both the 5A boys and 5A girls team titles. The names that carried last season are largely gone, though: Manhattan's Caeleb Hutchinson finished a four-time 6A champion and is now at Illinois, and Junction City's Juliana Villanueva capped a perfect 36-0 senior year and a three-time-title career.

What returns is still deep. The headliner is Rose Hill's Thunder Page, a two-time state champion who enters the winter ranked No. 6 in the country at 165 — the top returning boy in Kansas — as only a junior. Maize reloads behind a junior core of its own: Everett Joyce, a two-time 6A champion at 190, and 138-pound champion Vincent Rosas, with runner-up Antonio Guebara and two-time champion Cooper Smith also back. Add Maize South's Josh Kerr (a two-time 5A champion ranked in the national top 25), Goddard's Oscar Gauna (a 5A 113 champion ranked in the national top 15), De Soto's Emerson Tjaden (a 5A 165 champion), Southeast of Saline's Roman Tuttle (a two-time 3-1A champion still only a sophomore), Douglass's Carter Green (a 4A champion ranked nationally at 215), and Lansing's Noah Mathis (a national top-15 heavyweight), and the returning class spans every class and weight.

The girls side may return even more at the top, and our own data kept mislabeling it until we cleaned it up. The top returning girl in the state is Shawnee Mission South's Siobhan Flanner — a 6A 170-pound champion and Fargo national champion ranked No. 2 in the country — whom our board had filed under a Missouri club until this week. Derby's Presley Beard won a 6A title at 120 as an undefeated freshman and is a national top-15 sophomore now; Norton's Kaison Miller, a 3-1A champion, is ranked No. 2 nationally at 135. Garden City's Marina Loera, a 6A 125 champion, anchors a deep Garden City girls room that just repeated as 6A team champions with all five of its state finalists coming back. Frontenac's Harper Holmes (a back-to-back 4A champion), Wamego's Leolyn Karnowski (a 4A 155 champion ranked in the national top 10), and Maize's Scarlett Yeager (a 6A finalist ranked in the national top 15) round out a top tier that is young and getting deeper.

Looking ahead, Hoxie is the clearest team favorite in the state: its 3-1A title came off a lineup with barely any seniors, and nearly the entire scoring core returns. Maize brings back enough of its 6A champions to defend, Garden City's girls look reloaded for a 6A three-peat run, and Basehor-Linwood — fresh off its double — returns pieces on both sides. The small-school girls races, 4A and 3-1A, still young as statewide events, are where the sport's fastest growth is showing up in the standings.

The honest caveat, and Kansas made us work for it: the raw ratings lean heavily on club and freestyle tags, and the top of our board needed real cleaning. Marquee names were filed under clubs — WTC, Prairie Outlaws, Red Venom, Girls With Grit — rather than their KSHSAA schools; our No. 1 'Missouri' girl was actually Kansas's Siobhan Flanner; a top 'girl' on our board turned out to be a boy, a state runner-up, mis-gendered in the data; and border tournaments pulled Kansas schools like Chanute and Frontenac into Missouri's results and vice versa. We also tightened our youth-age classification this week so eighth graders stopped drifting onto the high school boards. The wrestlers named above are the web-verified high schoolers, with graduations, mislabels, and out-of-state names screened out. One note specific to Kansas: our career records aggregate club and offseason matches, so they run higher than a wrestler's official single-season mark.

Search any Kansas 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.