Takedown Report

Girls’ wrestling now the fastest-growing sport in the Country, and it starts young

When Ben Fallon was growing up in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, all he ever wanted to do was play football. Fallon was in fourth grade, and in Western Pennsylvania, pretty much every boy wants to play football. However, his parents had some strong feelings about that sport. “My parents wouldn’t let me play football, and I was just looking for a sport that I could be really physical in and get some of that energy out that I think all fourth-grade boys have,” Fallon said.
Wrestling was a sport in which he competed during middle school, high school and college. It was a passion for the sport he never really lost because, as he says, it shaped his character and his adult life. “Wrestling for me was a place where there’s no one else to blame but yourself when you are out there,” Fallon said. “You get out what you put in, and you own 100% of your success and your failure. And I liked that.”
“What really made me commit so much time and effort and energy was just wanting to not only win but show myself that I could be one of the best,” he said. When he and his wife, Corrine, got married and started having children, Fallon always believed he might find himself coaching a son. Except the son never came. Fallon, 36, smiles broadly. “I thought when my third daughter was born that wrestling was totally off the table for me,” he said. “I was kind of resigned to the fact that we were going to be a soccer family my whole life.”
And he was fine with that. However, that all changed last winter when his wife ran into the local club wrestling coach at Franklin Regional. He casually mentioned they were having “weigh-ins” if their girls wanted to join up. “When Corrine told me, I didn’t even really give my kids an option,” he said. “I just said, ‘Hey, I have good news. We’re going to try wrestling this winter.’ So it wasn’t like something that I had been planning on doing with them because I didn’t even know we had a girls’ program.”
All three girls, 8, 5 and 3, came to the first weigh-in, wrestled and fell in love with it on their own, Fallon swears. Last weekend, they competed as part of the Franklin Regional Junior Wrestling Program in their first tournament.
The girls are not alone. While the sport of wrestling has long been a male-dominated field, it has experienced significant growth among girls in middle and high school over the past decade. College-level female wrestling has also seen a big boom, Fallon said. “In fact, girls’ wrestling is now recognized as the fastest-growing high school sport in the United States, outpacing both football and basketball,” he said. “Here in Pennsylvania, nearly 250 high schools offer competitive wrestling for girls.”
Colin Dunlap, a Pittsburgh-based talk-radio host who spent … more at … https://www.timesrepublican.com/opinion/columnists/2025/12/girls-wrestling-now-the-fastest-growing-sport-in-the-country-and-it-starts-young/

December 16, 2025 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized | news, sports, wrestling