September 2026 · For wrestlers and football parents · 4 minute read
It is mid-September. Your football season has about eight weeks left in it, and wrestling practice starts the week after your last game. You do not need to do anything now that costs you a rep on the field. You need to do five small things on a schedule, so that November does not ambush you. The case for why a football player should wrestle at all, position by position, is on Why Wrestling Makes Better Football Players. The short version: Hudl's blog put it as "the perfect stance for a takedown mirrors great tackling form," and Curley Culp, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, was an All-American in both football and wrestling at Arizona State. Football coaches know this. That is why so many of them send their linemen to the wrestling room.
The countdown
- 8 weeks out (this week) Find the wrestling coach in the building and say one sentence: "I'm coming out in November." Coaches plan their rooms around numbers, and the players who give notice get a spot, a drill partner, and a mentor on day one. Then ask one question: "Where do you see me weight-wise?" The answer should be at or near your football weight. High school weight classes run from 106 to 285 pounds, so there is a division for the slot receiver and one for the left tackle. If anyone, including a teammate, suggests a first-year wrestler should drop a big number to hit a class, that is the wrong answer; read The Truth About Cutting Weight and then talk to the coach.
- 6 weeks out Watch one full match, all six minutes, so the pace is not a surprise. There are no high school matches to attend in October, so use the video library. While you watch, learn three words: takedown, escape, and pin. Those three explain about 80% of what you will see, and the rest is on Terms & Scoring. Notice how much of a match is a hand fight. You already know how to do that.
- 4 weeks out Order wrestling shoes and headgear now. November is when every wrestler in the country orders the same sizes, and back orders are real. Do not buy a singlet; the team handles those. What to get and what to skip is on Gear & Uniforms. Two hundred dollars is not required; sixty to one hundred is typical for a first year.
- 2 weeks out The last games. Football ends with bruises, and the temptation is to treat the gap between the final whistle and the first wrestling practice as either a vacation or a crash course. Do neither. Sleep, eat like an athlete, let the bruises fade, and walk into the room fresh. Your conditioning is already better than most of the room's; what you need is a body that is not still sore from Friday night.
- Week 0: first practice Read Your First Practice the night before. Here is the honest forecast: technique will humble you for about a month, and during that same month your athleticism will keep you in every match. Both are normal. Give it a full season before you decide what you think. A remarkable number of football players show up for football reasons and end up loving wrestling more.
The deal you are actually making
You are not leaving football. You are spending the winter on the best off-season program a football player can find: contact without helmet collisions, so the head gets a season off from impacts while the body stays physical; conditioning that carries straight through the months football players traditionally get soft; and six minutes alone on a mat with nowhere to hide, which builds a fourth-quarter mentality no conditioning test can. The seasons dovetail on purpose. Football ends in November, wrestling ends before spring ball, and college recruiters openly treat a wrestling background as a plus on film. The scheduling case and the NFL list are on the football page.
Girls on the roster: same door
If you kick, play the line, or fill any other spot on a football roster, everything above applies to you, and the wrestling room has a place for you. Girls' high school wrestling is among the fastest-growing high school sports in the country, with 74,064 participants in 2024-25 by NFHS's count, and nearly every state now runs a separate girls' division with its own state championship. Start on our girls' wrestling page, then tell the coach the same sentence: "I'm coming out in November."
For football coaches reading this
The best recruiting pipeline a wrestling program has is a football coach who says "my linemen wrestle." The reverse is also true: a wrestling room sends your program tacklers with elite pad level and hands that win first contact. Talk to your school's wrestling coach this month, before the season starts and the rooms are set. If your school has no wrestling program, the New Coach Starter Guide is where one begins.
The one-sentence version
Tell the wrestling coach this week; everything else on the list follows from that one conversation.
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Sources: Hudl, "The Link between Football and Wrestling" · Pro Football Hall of Fame, Curley Culp · NFHS participation figures