The Georgia High School Association (GHSA), which oversees high school sports in Georgia, has added an official Girls State Wrestling Championships ... while the Executive Board of the Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) has voted unanimously to create a separate state wrestling championship division for girls.
Both Georgia and Oregon will have their first girls' mat championships starting in the 2018-19 school year.
These two states join Alaska, California, Hawaii, Tennessee, Texas and Washington which already have a girls-only competition in their state tournaments.
Georgia, which has 250 females wrestling in high school, will have a separate championship event next spring, while Oregon, which claims approximately 400 high school girls in wrestling, will have something of a hybrid in 2019 which will allow girls to compete against each other in a separate championship event, or continue to wrestle boys in the traditional state tournament. In another wrinkle, Oregon, unlike other states which sanctions girls wrestling as a separate championship, girls will have their own division for state championship under the wrestling banner, much like how Class 6A is its own division for wrestling, according to the Oregon Statesman-Review.
Nationwide, approximately 14,600 girls participated in wrestling in high school during the 2016-17 school year, up from 804 in 1994. Approximately 245,000 boys wrestle in high school nationwide. At the high school level, total participation in the sport last year -- male and female -- was just shy of 270,000 student-athletes.
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