I found an interesting website which ranks high school wrestling teams & also ranks wrestlers by weight class.
https://intermatwrestle.com/rankings/high_school/Team
The #1 & #2 ranked wrestling teams are rivals. One is located in Pennsylvania & the other in New Jersey.
This is a different ranking than that of Flo Wrestling.
This is a photo of a typical recruitable wrestler after a match.
https://intermatwrestle.com/rankings/high_school/145?
Photo shows a very laid-back Lachan McNeil of Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, Pennsylvania after winning a match. McNeil was ranked #1 in the nation in high school at 145 lbs. weight class.
P.S. Might need some caffeine as his eyes are closed in the photo.
@HMom16: Check out Harvard’s wrestling roster. Several prep school athletes on the team.
https://gocrimson.com/sports/wrest/2019-20/roster
Includes several prep school students from Phillips Academy, Belmont Hill (2), Wyoming Seminary, and Northfield Mount Herman.
Harvard, as part of the Ivy League, is a D-I --although non-athletic scholarship–team.
Check out your son’s wrestling schedule to determine whether his school competes against any of the schools represented on Harvard’s roster. If so, then there may be a chance of being recruited as your son is undefeated & almost certainly qualified academically.
Some organizations list the top high school wrestlers in a particular state as a recruiting aid for NCAA wrestling teams.
Most consider Pennsylvania to be the top state for high school wrestling.
PA Power Wrestling lists the top 200 wrestling recruits in the state of Pennsylvania. All 200 are high school seniors. Includes Catholic schools, public high schools & private schools.
The top ranked Pennsylvania high school senior in 2018 was a 132 lb. class wrestler from Wyoming Seminary–Beau Bartlett–who accepted an offer from Penn State.
Lists like this are available to all coaches for recruiting purposes:
https://www.papowerwrestling.com/pennsylvanias-class-of-2020-top-200-recruits-released/
Some lists include the top 500 recruits:
https://www.papowerwrestling.com/top-500-recruits-of-2018-new-2/
Look at:
Colorado School of Mines.
Colorado Mesa (as an engineering degree is actually a U of Colorado - Boulder degree, but it is a D2 athletics school)
Colorado Mesa for engineering ?
Agree that Colorado School of Mines is an excellent school academically.
I don’t know anything about Colorado Mesa.
If your son is committed to the engineering route, Mines is a great school that probably punches above it’s weight. The biggest downside is if you want to completely change academic fields the options are limited. Also I think the male/female balance is a bit out of whack, which may be a negative for him but positive for you.
Wrestling-wise they could very well be in the category of schools that are willing to take a chance on a kid with raw but undeveloped talent.
I forget about them when I gloss over D2 because S was never interested in engineering. So even though overall they aren’t as highly ranked, in that area I think they are pretty well respected. For the right kid, it’s a good choice.
My son got “national wrestler of the week” and the picture they posted looked a lot like this. Cotton shoved up his nose, looks like he was just on the losing end of a fight, and possibly the happiest kid you have ever seen, because he had just beaten his D1 bound opponent with a throw with literally 6 seconds left in the match.
For young wrestlers looking for top wrestling boarding schools in order to develop into a D-I recruit, consider the two best wrestling schools in the nation:
Wyoming Seminary in Pennsylvania and its rival Blair Academy in New Jersey. Both allow students to board.
Wyoming Seminary & Blair Academy are ranked #1 and #2 in the nation respectively among all high schools public & private.
Team picture for Wyoming Seminary (33 wrestlers):
https://www.wyomingseminary.org/athletics/upper-school-athletics/wrestling-boys-varsity
Wyoming Seminary wrestlers get recruited by the top wrestling programs in the US including Penn State, Oklahoma, Cornell, Northwestern, Columbia, Harvard, UNC, etc.
Wyoming Seminary offers a lot of sports (including ice hockey) for both males & females & has a very strong, vibrant theater & arts community.
Cannot find a team photo for Blair Academy wrestling. the team (33 wrestlers) roster shows members from 13 different states & Saudi Arabia. Places lots of wrestlers at Cornell, UPenn, & Lehigh. (Former Blair Academy head coaches have gone on to coach at Lehigh University.) While most Blair wrestlers are from New Jersey, 12 other states are represented on the team including California.
States with strong high school wrestling are Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and a several others.
Both schools offer tremendous community support for wrestling.
NCAA coaching staffs watch wrestlers from these two prep schools on a continuous basis.
Both top college wrestling programs and top academic programs are full of kiids from Blair and Wyoming Seminary. They are definitely the top 2. My son wrestled a kid from Seminary a few times at national events who hadn’t ever made varsity going into his senior year, I’m not sure if he did then or not. I just asked S where he was last night and he wasn’t sure but said he’s wrestling D1. Not many HS’s can have a kid spend most of his time on JV and still be a D1 recruit. Bergen Catholic and St. Edwards come up a lot too, although I don’t know if they board. St Ed’s has had an alum place at D1’s I think the last 37 years in a row.
I might add Illinois and Indiana to the list above. You will notice a theme to the states. There are a couple exceptions, but generally lots of blue collar type jobs in the states historically. It’s definitely a blue collar sport. Families with dads in the steel mills or coal mines or on the farm are used to hard work and having their body take some punishment. That isn’t universal of course, but I think the attitudes that come with that type of work have led to areas historically strong in the sport.
One advantage to that blue collar nature in college recruiting is that even though wrestling isn’t a revenue sport its athletes get cut quite a bit of slack on the test scores. If you are trying to put together a team with a 33 average ACT score you would be lucky to put together a middling D3 team. That’s not true for most non-revenue sports.
Both Wyoming Seminary & Blair Academy offer a PG (post graduate) year.
Both offer financial aid as well.
If you want to wrestle D-I–especially in the Ivy League–it may be worthwhile to spend a PG year at either school.
Students love these schools ! The over-riding theme at both schools is caring, acceptance, and opportunity.
I mention these schools–with which I am very familiar–because both are open to students from anywhere in the world as both offer boarding options.
The caliber of wrestler is unparalled at these schools in the US. Last year, for example, both schools had at least 7 nationally ranked wrestlers with Wyoming Seminary having 3 wrestlers ranked at #1 in their respective weight classes.
Lol. Everyone in my family was a coal miner. Sports were a way out. Lots of dads took their kids underground or to the steel mill and gave them a look at their future. It scared most of them, me included. I took the more academic route though but I did play sports.
“When Namath was 11, his dad took him to the steel mill where he worked. “It was terrifying,” Namath recalled. “The noise. The heat. The molten metal. I vowed I would never work in such a place, and to this day I’m convinced that’s why he took me there.” Sports were a far more promising alternative. “We always knew he was a quarterback,” says a friend from Beaver Falls. “We knew before anybody.””
BTW, looking at the some of the D2 and D3 lists I noticed RIT and WPI. Good schools for STEM. If your son is looking at something else like pre-med that opens the list up even more. Also, if I remember correctly, Ohio has pretty good wrestling and they have a lot of private HS programs, especially some of the Catholic Schools.
The St Ed’s streak ended in 2019 at 36 years, although some say it should “only” be 29, because in year 7 of the streak (1990) their sole AA was in Div 2. The longest high school streak going currently is Blair at 20 years. There are only a couple college programs that had an AA streak as long as St. Eds, which is flat out nuts.
I agree with @dadof4kids about the depth in the practice room at places like Blair. I know a number of kids who wrestled for the “Green” team at St Eds (basically the B varsity team) who went on to have nice careers in D2 and 3. Several others only broke through to the Gold team during their senior year and ended up in D1. Blair and WS are likely even more stacked than places like Eds or Bergen, because those places are pretty much factories that bring wrestlers in from all over the country.
To @publisher’s point about attending Blair or WS, I really wonder how many kids walk in “cold” to a program like that. My guess is that most of the kids who are going to end up there are on the radar pretty early.
Ah, yes, my kid’s shoulder was never the same after wrestling a kid from WS in the Thousand Islands!
Stevens Institute in Hoboken another good engineering school with wrestling. Rutgers has been doing a good job at keeping NJ’s top wrestlers home.
I grew up on a farm and ranch in the eighties. I’m not sure how much that means to the average person on the board, but it was a horrible time for the farm economy. Probably half of the people I knew lost their farms, many of them on land their families homesteaded over a hundred years earlier. I was not shielded from that at all. I would get pulled out of school to go watch people have sales where their life‘s work was divvied up among their lenders. I can remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was maybe 10 years old listening to my dad and grandpa try to figure out the best solution. One pretty serious consideration on the table was moving to rural Alaska because my mom was a teacher and my dad able bodied so least they could make some money there.
If I was 10 years older or 10 years younger I would probably be a farmer. But the message I got wasn’t that all of this could be yours. The message I got was you’re too smart to do this get the hell out.After years of watching my dad work 80 hours a week just to break even I did. I didn’t have my son’s athletic gifts so I had to use my brain.
The details are different, but when you’re a doctor’s kid the thought of getting beat up playing a sport seems pretty crazy. When you have the background that some of these kids have, taking some black eyes for a shot at a better life makes a lot of sense. Plus that kind of thing happens to Dad at work all the time anyway. Getting beat up a bit is no big deal.
And then you have kids like mine, who did not grow up with the wolf at the door. But he’s got a dad who did, and realizes that taking a bit of physical and emotional punishment isn’t necessarily a bad thing and can make you stronger. So instead of discouraging our kids from wrestling, we encourage it.
In a nutshell that’s my explanation for why states with more blue collar backgrounds are better and deeper at wrestling.
I’m too lazy to look up if this is representative or not, But kids who S wrestled or is friends with from Blair and WS that I know the hometowns of are from Florida, Washington, Texas and Arizona. One is NJ, but I don’t know if he is really local or the family moved to NJ so he could wrestle there.
The engineering school at Colorado Mesa is really part of the U of Colorado school of engineering, and the diploma will be from CU. Mesa is a Western exchange school and those from western states get a discount on tuition, but not in the engineering school (jr/sr years) because the engineering school is really part of CU.
CU doesn’t have wrestling, but Mesa does. If someone wanted to wrestle, but also wanted to be part of a bigger U, Mesa might be the better choice than say School of Mines (Mines, Mesa, CU all public schools, although tuition at Mesa is MUCH cheaper).
Just a suggestion for someone who wants D2 sports (and a scholarship), engineering, a larger school, and some world class skiing, hiking, climbing opportunities in the neighborhood. Also a response to a post that said there were no ‘good’ D2 schools that offered science and engineering, and wrestling. There are.
@dadof4kids Stanford cut wrestling today, along with 10 other sports!
Surprising, but maybe not considering this:
“The financial model supporting 36 varsity sports is not sustainable. The average Division I athletics program sponsors 18 varsity sports. In fact, only one university at the Division I FBS level sponsored more varsity sports than Stanford prior to this change, and that institution does so with a significantly larger budget. Many of our peers at the Power Five level are supported by budgets that are much larger than ours while operating far fewer sports. Stanford’s more than 850 varsity student-athletes today represent 12% of our undergraduate population, a far higher percentage than exists at nearly all of our peer institutions.”
I saw the press release. One of the reasons cited specifically for wrestling was that they did not get a full bevy of scholarships so it was hard to recruit a good team.
Someone should tell Cornell (currently rated #2 or #3 depending on who does the ranking) that it is impossible to do what they do with only 5 scholarships. I think that would be news to them. By my count that’s 5 more scholarships than they have currently.
I think a big part of Stanford cutting those sports are that most aren’t offered by other PAC 12 schools. Travel costs more to go to the east coast to find other teams for sailing and field hockey, and there aren’t PAC 12 rivalries being forms.
Plus the PAC12 network sucks so the schools aren’t getting as much money as other Power 5 conferences off TV deals.