New Jersey Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Twenty-first in our state-by-state preview series: New Jersey, home of the purest championship format in the sport — one individual class, every school from Group 1 to the Catholic powers in the same brackets at Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. The team side is its own tournament: sectional dual brackets across four sections and five public groups plus Non-Public A and B, crowning group dual champions each February. And this season the whole calendar inverted: the team tournament now comes first, finals moving from Rutgers to Phillipsburg High School on February 7, and the individual championships land February 25-27 — late February, not the traditional March. Last season MatMetrics ingested 145,683 matches from 2,821 New Jersey events involving 34,148 wrestlers, girls at about 18.5% of the field — in the state that sanctioned girls wrestling first in the Northeast, back in 2018-19, and has run the girls finals on the Boardwalk Hall mats alongside the boys ever since.

The 2026 team hardware spread wide: Delaware Valley (Group 1) and Camden Catholic (Non-Public B, on a 34-dual winning streak) went back-to-back, Rumson-Fair Haven won a third straight Group 2 title as a six seed by two points, Delsea ran its Group 3 streak to five, Southern Regional became the first Shore Conference program ever to win four straight (Group 5), Mount Olive broke through in Group 4 after handing Phillipsburg its first sectional-final loss to a Morris County team since 1972, and Delbarton reclaimed Non-Public A, 34-20 over Christian Brothers Academy. Jackson Memorial made history as the first-ever NJSIAA girls team champion at 19-0. And in Paulsboro, an era bent: Audubon ended the program's sixteen-year sectional-title streak — the winningest team program in state history has now gone two seasons without a group crown.

At Boardwalk Hall, Delbarton won the individual team race and half the finals featured somebody who's back. Cameron Sontz won his third straight title — 106, 113, 120 — and enters the winter chasing the rarest thing in New Jersey wrestling: a fourth, in the single-class era that makes every title a true all-state championship. He's a Lehigh commit ranked in the national top five, and he isn't even the highest-ranked returner: CBA's Paul Kenny, a two-time champion and U17 world champion headed to Iowa, sits at No. 2 in the country at 132. Howell's Tanner Hodgins (an Oklahoma State commit with a U17 world bronze), Rumson's two-time champion Sonny Amato (now a Rutgers commit), Lacey's Killian Coluccio (Virginia Tech), and Middletown North's Thomas Blewett — 50-1, a champion at 106 — all return titles; St. Joseph Regional's JoJo Burke, CBA's Sean Kenny, and Bergen Catholic's sophomore champion Gideon Gonzalez and Fargo All-American Matthew Mulligan crowd the national rankings behind them. Delbarton alone returns seven ranked wrestlers — Marchetti, DeGeorge, Schwartz, and more — which is why Non-Public A reads like a four-team war with Bergen Catholic, St. Joe's, and CBA.

The girls side mirrors the boys beat for beat. Hanover Park's Gabriella Conte won her third straight title at 107 and runs her own four-timer chase — meaning Atlantic City could crown a boys and a girls four-timer on the same weekend. Around her: Roselle Park's Lucia Ranieri, Lenape Valley's Angelina Qualtieri, River Dell's Jocelyn Danbe, and Paulsboro's Sheyna Cruz all return 2026 titles; High Point's Elle Changaris returns both a title and a Fargo 16U freestyle runner-up finish; Hillsborough's Maria Imhauser leads the upper weights. The structural story keeps compounding — girls districts debuted in 2026, the girls team dual tournament (Jackson's crown) expands this season, and participation has roughly doubled in four years. One hard subplot sits over both genders: within a single year the NJSIAA stripped titles from its reigning boys four-timer (Anthony Knox, 2025, now at Rutgers) and vacated a girls three-timer's 2026 crown (Ella Poalillo, who has left the state field) — an integrity-enforcement streak with no modern precedent here.

Looking ahead: the four-timer chases headline every session, Non-Public A is the deepest team race in the country east of the national-prep lane (Blair Academy's four top-10 wrestlers sit out NJSIAA competition entirely), Mount Olive and Southern defend against reloading Phillipsburg and Toms River East, and Paulsboro — Paul Morina's 800-plus career wins and 2026 finalist Will Cruz in the room — tries to restart the oldest dynasty in the state. Fargo gave the preview its girls exclamation point: Francesca Gusfa won a Junior freestyle national title, just the fourth New Jersey girl ever. First practice is November 30, matches start December 7, and the season ends where it always ends — on the boardwalk.

The honest caveat, and New Jersey's was mercifully light: the cleanest raw boards of any state this series — the top of our girls rankings is almost entirely legitimate school rows rather than clubs. The audit still earned its keep: a 'twin' pair of Duffy profiles at CBA turned out to be one graduated champion (now at Iowa) under two name variants, now linked; four more name-variant duplicates were linked; a Pennsylvania school was found sitting in our New Jersey state filter atop a many-row duplicate family that's flagged for a proper merge; and one nationally ranked name carries a club-labeled profile cluster we've flagged rather than trusted. New Jersey natives at out-of-state preps (including the No. 1-ranked girl in the country at 120) are excluded from NJSIAA framing. 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 New Jersey 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.