Nebraska Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Thirteenth in our state-by-state preview series: Nebraska, where the season opens with practices on November 16 and the first competitions December 3 and ends in February at the CHI Health Center in Omaha. The NSAA runs boys wrestling in four classes — A, B, C, and D, split by enrollment — and girls in two, Class A and Class B, a division the association only sanctioned in 2021-22 and split into two classes for the first time in 2025. That girls bracket is the state's fastest-growing story: last season MatMetrics ingested 238,505 matches from 1,562 Nebraska events involving 36,101 wrestlers, up from 192,787 matches the year before, and the girls' share of the field climbed to about 30% as girls participation jumped nearly 24% year over year.

February's team races rewarded staying power. In the individual-tournament team standings, Creighton Prep won Class A for the second straight year, Omaha Skutt Catholic took Class B for its 23rd title, Battle Creek three-peated in Class C, and Plainview returned to the top of Class D, edging defending champion Burwell by four and a half points. On the girls side, Omaha Westside won Class A and Adams Central took Class B. Our power ratings, which weight schedule strength rather than a single weekend, see the small-class races a little differently — they rate Burwell and Pierce at the very top of Classes D and C — but the championship results are the record. The graduating class is deep: Class A 138 champion Kiernan Meink (Millard South) is off to SIU-Edwardsville, two-time Class A champion Jaeston Delano (Columbus) went 50-1 as a senior, and heavyweight Preston Wagner (Fremont) is now a freshman at Virginia.

The returning boys are led by Creighton Prep sophomore Cruzer Dominguez, a two-time Class A champion — he won at 106 as a freshman and tech-falled his way to the 120 title as a sophomore — who enters the winter ranked No. 19 in the country at 126, the top returning boy in Nebraska. Omaha Bryan's Khy'ree Thomas-Calloway is right behind after a perfect 52-0 junior season and a Class A 113 title, and Omaha Skutt's Ben Ziola, a three-time Class B champion who flipped his college commitment to Nebraska on October 31, is chasing a fourth. Hartington Cedar Catholic's Easton Hochstein brings back two Class C titles at 150 and back-to-back undefeated seasons — one of three wrestling Hochstein brothers in that room. And the best story may be the youngest: Omaha North freshman Terence Crawford Jr., son of boxing champion Terence 'Bud' Crawford, was the only freshman to win a Class A title last February, at 106.

The girls side graduated most of its champions but returns a national-caliber top tier. Omaha Skutt's Kaylyn Harrill is the headliner — a three-time Class A 120 champion who went 60-0 last season, a state single-season wins record, and enters the winter ranked No. 2 in the country, on track to become Nebraska's first four-time girls state champion. Millard West's Sofia Hoegemeyer, a two-time Class A champion now ranked nationally at 135, and Sutherland's Addison Arvdal, a two-time Class B 190 champion and the only wrestler to finish her class undefeated last year, give the two-class girls bracket two more returning champions with national rankings. Behind them the turnover is real: four-time-caliber seniors like Yutan's Jordyn Campbell — the first NSAA girl to 200 career wins — Conestoga's Maggie Fiene, and Omaha Westview's Kalynn Lyons all graduated.

Looking ahead, the questions are about dynasties and depth. Creighton Prep and Omaha Skutt both return enough to defend on the boys side, while Battle Creek chases a fourth straight Class C title. The girls races are the more open watch: with so many champions gone, Harrill, Hoegemeyer, and Arvdal anchor a bracket whose depth is still catching up to its fast-growing numbers — and whoever fills in behind them will define how far the girls division has come since its 2021 launch.

The honest caveat, and Nebraska made us work for it: almost every top name on our raw board was filed under a club — Nebraska Bulls, Nebraska Wrestling Academy, MWC, Black Fox, AMDG — rather than an NSAA school, and resolving each took most of the effort. Several of the state's best wrestlers were sitting in the wrong gender's rankings entirely: Cruzer Dominguez, Ben Ziola, and others were tagged female, and Dominguez was filed under North Dakota rather than Nebraska — all fixed this week. We also loaded the NSAA's new 2026-28 classifications (the ones on the association's static PDFs were a year out of date), merged duplicate school entries like the two Papillion-La Vista rows, and screened out a heavy 2026 graduating class — fifteen of the roughly two dozen top names we checked have graduated. The wrestlers named above are the web-verified returners; 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 Nebraska 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.