File photo by Travis Rosenau New Ulm Area’s Alex Portner gets a takedown during a 120-pound prep wrestling match on Jan. 19 at New Ulm High School.

While interest in the sport of wrestling is climbing, Minnesota will be taking down a weight class at the prep level next season.

The Minnesota State High School League announced Thursday via press release that at the beginning of the 2023-24 prep wrestling season, participation in boys and girls wrestling in Minnesota will be across 13 weight divisions.

The newly-approved weight classes are the result of a National Federation of State High School Associations wrestling rules modification that required each state association to select the number of weight classes for their state at 12, 13 or 14.

The press release stated that the MSHSL board used information from a survey of member schools and a recommendation from the League’s Wrestling Advisory Committee in making their decision.

In the 2002-03 season, boys wrestling went from 13 to 14 weight classes.

The new approved weight divisions for girls wrestling are 100 pounds, 106, 112, 118, 124, 130, 136, 142, 148, 155, 170, 190 and 235. For boys wrestling, the weight classes will be 107, 114, 121, 127, 133, 139, 145, 152, 160, 172, 189, 215 and 285.

Kevin Briggs, head coach of the Class AA New Ulm Area wrestling team, said the change will obviously help smaller schools the most, but he does see it helping the Eagles in the upper weights.

“In years past, 13 would help us because we weren’t able to fill a team,” Briggs said. “Currently, we’re able to fill a team, but it’s a stretch sometimes because we’re asking kids to give up weight. … For smaller programs, for Class A and AA, 13 weight classes is obviously better than 14. For us, too, we have less athletes in the upper weights, so with them taking out an upper weight, it’s going to help us as well. Thirteen weight classes is what I was accustomed to in high school when I wrestled, and it’s basically going back to what that was. As much as things change, they kind of I guess stay the same as what they were 20 years ago.”

Keeping both larger and smaller schools in mind, Springfield wrestling head coach Todd Bertram said he assumed the decision to cut back one weight class would be the final outcome for next season.

While he’s happy with the decision, he said he’d like to see even more flexibility down the road, especially for smaller Class A teams like the Tigers.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” Bertram said. “I wish they’d be a little more flexible to think about what football does — allowing a separate class that might only have 64 teams that are going to have even 11 weights, something that might even be a little bit more dramatic. But the choice was something that everyone is going to do, and I know the reason for that is that often you compete against schools that are close by that might be in a different class, so they wanted to make that uniform, they wanted tournaments to be uniform, so I totally get that. But I might be in favor of even scaling that back a little bit more. And again, only for those small schools that are struggling to keep their sport and don’t want to co-op, this gives them an option to compete in a lower class like a nine-man football class.”

Cole Cooreman, head coach for the Class A Wabasso Rabbits wrestling team, has been in favor of cutting back on weight classes for several years. He said dropping back to 13 weight classes is a step in the right direction.

“I think 13 is a good step,” Cooreman said. “They gave us the options to vote on 12, 13 or keep 14 weights. It was going to be new weights no matter what, it was just how many weights you wanted to go. I kind of thought that 13 was going to be the way that everybody went because I thought 12 was too drastic of a change, as well as people liked the fact that it’s an odd number, so it’s a natural tiebreaker in times of tie. I still think that for some of us smaller schools that 12 would have been better, but 13’s definitely a step in the right direction.”

Cooreman added that this decision should help schools larger than Wabasso also in terms of developing talent.

“A lot of [the larger schools] were just as big of a proponent of dropping a weight class,” Cooreman said. “Filling the 14 weight classes, it’s tough, especially with wrestling being as tough of a sport as it is — to find 30 kids a that want to go an compete. Somehow the landscape of wrestling has changed the last couple of years where if you’re not on varsity, for some reason kids think that they’re not good anymore. Whereas for a lot of years, there was a varsity, a b-squad and a c-squad. Hopefully this 13 weight lets those bigger schools get a chance to have full b-squads and those kids can get a chance to develop behind varsity guys so that they actually get to have some transition years instead of being thrust out into a varsity spot as seventh-, eighth-grader.”

And with one less varsity spot available, teams could also see more in-house competition and a better overall team as a result.

“It should help in a sense that when you have one less varsity spot, now the kids have got to work harder to get that varsity spot,” Briggs said. “If you have two kids, one of them goes here, one of them goes there. Well, now you’ve got two kids fighting for one spot for example in those upper weights, and so it’s going to provide more competition and therefore a better varsity wrestler. For the most part, the biggest factor is where these kids come in and if they’re wanting to cut weight or if we’re able to fill the weights without giving up weight and that’s always something that gets to be determined after the season starts.”

After 20 years of 14 weight classes in Minnesota at the high school level, the decision to cut back a class wasn’t an overnight idea or decision.

But for next season and the foreseeable future, the scales will tip in favor of 13 weight classes.