Missouri Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Twelfth in our state-by-state preview series: Missouri, and it heads into 2026-27 with a structural first. Last season MatMetrics ingested 189,689 matches from 1,282 Missouri events involving 30,998 wrestlers, up from 167,161 matches the year before, with girls making up about 36% of the field. MSHSAA aligns boys wrestling in four classes (Class 1 through 4) and girls in two (Class 1 and 2), and for years crowned all of them on one combined weekend at Mizzou Arena in Columbia. That changes this season: for the first time, the girls get their own championship weekend, moving to the Hearnes Center on February 18-20, 2027, while the boys stay at Mizzou Arena on February 25-27 — a milestone for a girls division MSHSAA only launched in 2019 and that has grown fast enough to need its own stage.

The team races are studies in staying power. In Class 4, Liberty won its seventh straight team title — by two and a half points over Hickman, the closest of the seven — while Odessa made it three in a row in Class 2, Centralia two straight in Class 1, and St. Michael the Archangel broke through in Class 3. On the girls side the dynasties are just as entrenched: Kearney has won four straight Class 1 titles and Nixa three in a row in Class 2. The headline graduations are real, though — Hickman's Jordan Fincher went 40-0 for a Class 4 title and is now at Kent State, and Brookfield's Jayden Keller closed a four-time-champion career at 202-2.

The returning boys are led by Odessa's Jet Brown, a three-time state champion and Navy commit who enters the winter ranked No. 5 in the country at 157 — the top returning boy in Missouri. Two more big-class champions headline the senior class: CBC's Colin Rutlin, a Class 4 157-pound champion and Arkansas-Little Rock commit ranked in the national top 15, and Hickman's Luke Hayden, a three-time champion and Purdue commit at 175. Add Helias Catholic's Zyan Knollmeyer (a Class 3 heavyweight champion ranked in the national top 15), Lafayette's Carter Brown (a Class 4 champion ranked No. 3 in the country at 285), Seneca's Brant Laughlin (a Class 2 144 champion), Liberty's Roman Stewart (a Class 4 finalist ranked nationally at 144), and Hickman's Quincey Crawford (a national top-20 junior), and the state returns champions in every class.

The girls side returns a national-caliber top tier, much of it in one room. Kearney's Carli Vargas is the headliner — a Class 1 190-pound champion ranked No. 7 in the country — and her teammate Zolah Williams, a Class 1 105 champion, is a national top-15 sophomore, the engine of a Kearney program chasing a fifth straight Class 1 title. Ste. Genevieve brings back two champions in Lexi Wolk, who won a Class 1 title at 100 as a freshman and was named Missouri's girls wrestler of the year, and senior Keely Fallert, a two-time champion ranked in the national top 20. Fulton's Mackinzie Brewer (Class 1 125), Republic's Mabel Rogers (Class 2 115), Fort Osage's Jauzlyean Gray (Class 2 135), and Willard's Scout Puryear (a Class 2 130 champion as a freshman) give the two-class girls bracket a deep, young core heading into its first solo weekend.

Forward, the questions are about dynasties and the new stage. Liberty will chase an eighth straight Class 4 title with Hickman — which lost by 2.5 — reloading right behind it, while Odessa and Seneca renew a Class 2 rivalry that returns firepower on both sides. The girls races may be the more compelling watch: Kearney and Nixa both return enough to extend their streaks, but the move to a standalone Hearnes Center weekend gives the girls division a spotlight it has never had, right as its depth catches up to the boys.

The honest caveat, and Missouri leaned on it hard: almost every top name on our raw board was filed under a club, not a high school — Missouri Gold, Bulltrained, Red Venom, Team STL Black — and resolving each to its MSHSAA school was most of the work. A few were not Missourians at all: our board's top 'Missouri' girl was actually Kansas's Siobhan Flanner, and another highly rated 'Missourian' wrestles for Roxana in Illinois; both were screened out, along with Kansas border schools like Chanute and Frontenac that bled into Missouri's results. One wrestler was tagged to the wrong school entirely — a four-time champion filed under 'Ridgway' who actually wrestled for Brookfield, and has since graduated. 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 and out-of-state names removed; career records on our site aggregate club and offseason matches, so they run higher than official single-season marks.

Search any Missouri 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.