Virginia Wrestling 2026-27: By the Numbers

Twentieth in our state-by-state preview series: Virginia, where practices opened this week, competition starts November 30, and the postseason runs region tournaments into a split state weekend, February 17-20 — Salem Civic Center for the small classes and, new this year, Classes 3 and 4 on midweek dates, with Virginia Beach Sports Center hosting Classes 5 and 6. The VHSL runs six enrollment classes with four regions each, team titles decided on tournament points — there's no dual championship — and the private schools wrestle entirely separately under VISAA. The girls are the structural story: 2025-26 was their first season as a fully sanctioned VHSL sport, and in 2026-27 the girls championships split into two class-based tournaments for the first time, co-located with the boys. Last season MatMetrics ingested 145,156 matches from 695 Virginia events involving 33,342 wrestlers, girls at about 18% of the field — and Virginia's official girls participation has roughly doubled every two seasons since 2022.

February's team races crowned three repeat champions and closed one of American wrestling's great books. Grassfield won Class 6 going away — 255 points, nearly double the runner-up — for back-to-back titles; Cox three-peated in Class 5, beating Great Bridge into second for the second straight year; Woodgrove three-peated in Class 4; Skyline repeated in Class 3 with a school-record four champions; and Poquoson went back-to-back in Class 2 with six individual champions. Class 1 carried the weight of history: Rural Retreat's title — its first since 2017 — came at the expense of Grundy, the winningest program in Virginia history, in the Golden Wave's final season before consolidation into the new Southern Gap High School. The farewell tournament the dynasty couldn't win is the kind of ending you don't script.

The returning boys are young — no returner can reach four titles this winter, which makes the race about who starts the next dynasty. Christiansburg's Reza Massjouni, a state champion at 144 who took double runner-up honors at Fargo and sits in the national top 15 at 150, is the headliner of the rebuild at the program that once won seventeen straight team titles. Mountain View's Ibrahim Dheel — a Super 32 placer ranked in the national top 20 at 175 — leads Class 6; Skyline's two-time champion Paden Alyea (50-2) and Staunton River's two-time champion Graydon Martin both chase thirds, Martin young enough to keep a four-title career alive. Grassfield's Nolan Mather won an NHSCA Junior Nationals title in the spring; Heritage-Leesburg's Bryson Galofaro, a champion at 132, added a Super 32 Early Entry title this fall; and George C. Marshall's Adrian Canales — a Class 6 champion as a freshman with a U17 Pan-American medal — headlines the youth. Gloucester's unbeaten Kenneth Hamilton, Millbrook's William Potter, Woodgrove's Ibrahim Zaky, Skyline's Jacob Buffum, and Ocean Lakes' freshman champion Matthew DeAngelo fill out a deep returning-champion class.

The girls side returns a national headliner and a wide-open field. Mountain View's Sarissa Tucker won the Fargo Junior freestyle national title at 110 this summer — with a U20 Pan-American gold already on the shelf — and became the first Virginia girl invited to Who's Number One; a two-time state champion before a year away at an academy program, she's back in the Mountain View room per the preseason rankings and chasing a third VHSL crown. Behind her: Grayson County's Alliya Walker, a champion and Fargo placer at the lightest weights; Oakton's Allison Hegg; Riverside's Lily Oh; Woodbridge's Sarah Congleton; Tabb's Jayden Crotty — a girls champion who also wrestles boys brackets; and Kings Fork's Akaila Gray. The 2026 championships were decided without team scores, a sore point in the girls community; with the 2027 split into class-based tournaments, a true girls team race arrives — Oakton, Mountain View, and Kings Fork enter as the preseason favorites.

Looking ahead, the questions stack up neatly: can Southern Gap inherit Grundy's mystique and take Class 1 back from Rural Retreat; does Great Bridge — twenty-plus titles and Steve Martin on the bench, but none since 2023 — break through a Cox three-peat; and does Chesapeake stay the center of gravity with Grassfield's margin growing. Fargo gave Virginia its best summer in years — five All-Americans, led by Tucker's title and Massjouni's double finals — and the VISAA lane adds its own heavyweight rivalry, Benedictine over St. Christopher's by thirteen and a half last winter. The realignment shuffle everyone's discussing doesn't bite until 2027-28, so this season is the last dance for the current map.

The honest caveat, and Virginia's audit had a familiar centerpiece: our boards had Ohio's St. Paris Graham wrestlers — including two champions we named in the Ohio preview — filed under Graham of Bluefield, Virginia, a one-row school serving two states' programs (a third cohort, from a North Carolina Graham, is flagged for the same treatment). That's fixed, along with duplicate profiles for several named wrestlers and one verified girls champion whose profile was tagged male because she wrestles boys brackets. Our raw girls rankings for Virginia remain club-heavy — most of the top rows are out-of-state club entries rather than VHSL wrestlers, so the names above come from verified championship results, not our raw board. Two returning champions are unnamed here because their common names couldn't be safely matched to profiles. 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 Virginia 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.