Utah Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Nineteenth in our state-by-state preview series: Utah, where practices are opening now, the first matches hit November 24, and the postseason runs through two buildings — the UCCU Center in Orem for the big classes and the Sevier Valley Center in Richfield for the small schools, February 17-20, with the one-day 1A boys and 1A/2A girls championships moved up front to February 6 this season. The UHSAA runs boys wrestling in six classifications and girls in five, qualified through divisional tournaments, with team titles decided on tournament points — Utah hasn't held a separate dual championship in nearly a decade. Last season MatMetrics ingested 151,599 matches from 1,504 Utah events, up 22% year over year, involving 19,430 wrestlers — girls at 23% of the field. And here's the stat that frames the state: Utah's girls wrestle at roughly 1.7 times the national per-capita participation rate, five years after sanctioning.

The February team races broke in every direction. Layton completed a 6A four-peat with authority — 300.5 points and five individual champions, all of them Division-I signees, all of them now graduated. Wasatch won the closest race of the tournament, a three-team 5A fight settled by ten and a half points for its first title since 2020. Uintah took a third straight 4A crown (a sixth consecutive title across two classifications) behind five champions. Juab ran its 3A streak to ten in a row — the longest active run in Utah, closing on the longest in state history. And the small schools flipped: South Summit ended Millard's four-year 2A reign for its first title in a decade, and Altamont ended Panguitch's six-year 1A run after years of finishing second. The girls races matched the drama — Salem Hills won a first-ever title behind four champions and seven finalists, Mountain Crest took 4A by two points for its fifth crown in six years, Mountain Ridge repeated in 6A over Westlake, and Canyon View and Duchesne both completed three-peats.

The boys headliner is Juab's Ladd Holman — a three-time champion who pinned his 2026 final in 48 seconds, won the Fargo Junior Greco-Roman national title at 215 this summer, and committed to Oklahoma State. He's ranked in the national top 10, and the wrestler ranked a few spots behind him at the same weight lives one classification over: Wasatch's two-time champion Wyatt Hanssen, a Nebraska commit. They can't meet at state — which is exactly why Utah fans will be watching every preseason bracket they might share. Davis senior Austin Ellis, an Iowa State commit ranked in the national top 10 at 138, leads the 6A returners; Carbon's Riker O'Hearon and Uintah's two-time champion Maddax Hacking — younger brother of a graduated three-timer — carry the underclass flag; and Altamont returns three-time champion Gage Bird and fellow champion Levi Scott to defend the 1A title. Juab's Kaden Martineau and Union's Grady Roybal — whose brother Tucker left as a four-timer, now at Wyoming alongside fellow four-timer Austin Paris — round out the returning champions.

The girls side is young, deep, and nationally ranked at the ends of the lineup. Westlake's Tevia Nau Rarick — a 6A champion and Fargo Junior freestyle runner-up, No. 2 in the country at 190 — is the headliner, and the family name should ring familiar: her older sister was a four-time champion. Box Elder's Maycee Hales went 37-0 for a 5A title and took second at Fargo at 235; Uintah's Sadie Rhoades returns a three-time champion — Utah's clearest four-timer watch; Hillcrest's Katie Zimmerman, a two-time champion, inherits the mantle from her sister Eva, who just finished as a four-time champion and the state's Ms. Wrestling; and Corner Canyon's Piper Eller and Roy's freshman champion Avery Colvin give the small weights real depth. The honest growth note: Utah's girls participation roughly plateaued last year after years of explosive growth — the per-capita lead is still wide, but the national field is closing fast.

Looking ahead, the streak math is everywhere: Juab chases eleven straight, Layton a five-peat without five D-I seniors, Duchesne a girls four-peat, Mountain Crest six of seven. And the deeper identity story is style: Utah is a Greco-Roman factory — a state-record eight 16U Greco All-Americans at Fargo this summer, a fourth-place national team finish, and a Junior Greco podium streak that runs unbroken since 1988. Both Holman brothers won Fargo Greco titles in the same week. When the state tournament returns to Orem and Richfield in February, the question isn't whether Utah's best are nationally relevant — Fargo already answered that — it's which streak survives.

The honest caveat, lighter than usual this week: Utah's data audit was the cleanest of the series — a handful of duplicate profiles linked (including the headline girls name, filed under both her club and her school), one top returner whose profile carries a mislabeled team from an offseason event (named here, record unquoted), and one nationally ranked girl omitted entirely because two reliable sources disagree about which school she wrestles for this winter. Disputed point totals and single-source title counts are left out rather than guessed at. 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 Utah 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.