Ohio Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Seventeenth in our state-by-state preview series: Ohio, where practices open November 13, competition starts December 3, and everything funnels through sectionals and districts to the Schottenstein Center in Columbus, March 12-14 — the 90th boys state tournament and the 5th for the girls, who wrestle on the same mats the same weekend. The OHSAA runs boys wrestling in three enrollment divisions and the girls in a single statewide division, and the official team championship is points-based at the state tournament; the separate State Dual Team Tournament has been run by the coaches association since the OHSAA dropped its own duals event in 2020. Last season MatMetrics ingested 181,014 matches from 525 Ohio events involving 44,963 wrestlers — the largest wrestler pool of any state we've covered in this series so far. Girls were almost 23% of that field, and Ohio's official girls participation grew about 30% last year, past 3,200 wrestlers across 200-plus schools, four years after sanctioning.

The 2026 team races delivered one of the biggest results in recent Ohio history: Perrysburg 173.5, Lakewood St. Edward 168.5 — a five-point Division I final that ended St. Edward's run of ten consecutive state titles and gave Perrysburg its first, ever. The other end of the spectrum was business as usual: St. Paris Graham won Division III for its 25th consecutive team championship, 27 total — the longest active team-title streak in American high school wrestling — in its new home division after years of ruling Division II, where Columbus Bishop Watterson went back-to-back in 2026. At the coaches-association State Duals in February, St. Edward answered with its eighth straight Division I duals title, Columbus DeSales took Division II, Apple Creek Waynedale won its first in Division III, and Olentangy Orange ran through the girls bracket. And in the girls team race at state, Massillon Perry pulled off something remarkable: a first-ever title with just three qualifiers — all three of them won their weight.

The boys side returns two preseason national No. 1s, both chasing a fourth title. Perrysburg's Grey Burnett — No. 1 in the country at 132 and a Penn State commit — is a three-time champion coming off a U20 Pan-American gold and a 13-1 rout at Who's Number One in September, the first WNO win by an Ohioan in five years. Bishop Watterson's Michael Boyle, No. 1 at 215 and an Ohio State commit, is also a three-timer after winning the U20 US Open in freestyle. They follow Karson Brown, who left St. Edward in March as Ohio's 36th four-time state champion and is now a Buckeye. Behind the headliners: Brecksville's Zack Aquila (a state champion and Fargo Junior national champ at 175, headed to Little Rock), Perrysburg's Urijah Lopez — whose only loss in the 2026 final came against Brown — Graham's champions Jakob Hoke and Kyler Crooks, Streetsboro's two-time champion Jarreau Walker, Dublin Coffman's Oliver Lester, Lake Catholic's two-time champion Danny Zmorowski, and Milan Edison's Cohen Reer, who won a state title as a freshman and a Fargo 16U national championship in the same year.

The girls side has a four-timer watch of its own — two, actually. Steubenville's Talea Guntrum went 45-0 for a third straight title and leads the class of 2027; Massillon Perry's Carolyne Geckler is a two-time champion entering her junior year. The state's highest-ranked returner is Olentangy Orange's Mackenzie Carder, a state champion at 120 who added a Fargo Junior freestyle national title and a Super 32 crown this fall — her final against Marysville's Cami Leng is the in-state rivalry to track. Doylestown Chippewa's Kayla Moroschan (51-1), Gahanna Lincoln's KyLee Tibbs, Mount Vernon's two-time champion Ashlynn Brokaw, Barnesville's Ladyn Hines — a champion as a freshman — and Little Miami's Kaylee Vera, a Fargo 16U national champ, give Ohio one of the deepest returning girls classes anywhere. Perry returns its other two champions, Mia Forberg and Emma Shephard, to defend the team crown.

Looking ahead, the Division I question is pure revenge arithmetic: Perrysburg returns Burnett and Lopez plus two more nationally ranked wrestlers, St. Edward returns 190-pound champion Frankie Pieffer and the duals pedigree, and Dublin Coffman quietly returns four ranked names. Graham chases 26 straight. The Ironman in Cuyahoga Falls, December 11-13, will sort the national pecking order a month into the season — and in March, four wrestlers (Burnett, Boyle, Guntrum via 2027, Geckler on pace for 2028) will be somewhere on the four-title path at the Schott.

The honest caveat, and Ohio's had a familiar shape: the top girl on our raw Ohio board was actually Missouri's four-time champion Jayden Keller — her school, Brookfield, shares a name with an Ohio school and several others, and our database had merged multiple states' Brookfields into one row; it's flagged for a split rather than quoted. Two of the top names on our raw boys board turned out to be 2026 graduates, a four-time champion now at Ohio State was still sitting in the state filter alongside two other college programs, one returning champion had three profiles we linked, and one nationally ranked returner shares his name with twenty other wrestlers in our database — he goes unnamed here rather than mislinked. 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 Ohio 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.