EXPORT, Pennsylvania — 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. Now they will be competing as part of the Franklin Regional Junior Wrestling Program in their first tournament this weekend.
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 the first half of his career covering sports, said his daughter has been part of this boom that began one year before she entered Hampton High School, where she is now a freshman.
“I’ve been around a lot of athletic endeavors, but I’ve never seen something with the mutual respect wrestling offers between competitors — especially these girls right now, who all sort of know they are responsible for growing something,” he said. “They are the future right now.”
Dunlap said the sport has provided his daughter with a sense of discipline she hadn’t had to this point.
“She feels like she humbly has accomplished something, even if she doesn’t win,” he said. “It isn’t easy being a 14-year-old girl. It is an awkward time for a lot of reasons. But wrestling has made her understand she can accomplish.”
Dunlap said he sees in her and the other girls that they carry themselves in a way he has not seen from those in other sports.
“The quiet confidence screams from them without any ever needing to verbalize it.”
Last year, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association sanctioned the first-ever girls’ state wrestling tournament, which was held concurrently with the annual boys’ state wrestling tournament at Hersheypark’s Giant Center.
Pennsylvania is not alone. There are 45 other states in the country that also hold state championship tournaments for girls.
At the college level, women are now competing, with the NCAA adding women’s wrestling as a championship sport.
Fallon said when they opened up registration for the junior girls’ sport last month, they had 31 girls in kindergarten through sixth grade register for it.
“We’ve even had girls come in from other school districts who just wanted to wrestle,” he said. “But their school district doesn’t have a program.”
The Franklin Regional Junior Olympic Wrestling team is considered a club team. This weekend, it will be participating in the Keystone League dual match.
“It’s just a bunch of other junior Olympic wrestling clubs for school districts, like feeder programs that get their kids together,” Fallon said. “We pair them up by experience level, age, and weight. And every kid will get two matches.”
Fallon said the real boom with girls’ wrestling happened surprisingly during the pandemic.
“Pre-COVID, there were around 25,000 girl wrestlers across the country,” he said. “And as of last year, there were 87,000 girls registered to wrestle in a state-sanctioned wrestling team or college team.”
Fallon said the popularity in his state has only intensified with people such as Sen. David McCormick (R-PA), who wrestled in high school and at the U.S. Military Academy, bringing President Donald Trump to Pennsylvania for the NCAA championship.
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“What was great was not only seeing them there, but they stayed for the whole event, showing that what they were doing mattered,” Fallon said, adding that the high profile only adds to girls being interested.
“I also think it’s a combination of UFC getting really popular, and we see a lot of wrestlers who have become very successful,” he said. “McCormick is a senator, but you also have CEOs. There is just a lot of folks with a wrestling background, and I think it speaks to the hard work and dedication and ability to keep working through tough times. Girls are as attracted to that as much as boys.”
