In 2020, there were nearly 260,000 high school wrestlers. Surprisingly, there were only 14,000 college wrestlers in the NCAA, NAIA or junior colleges. That leaves around 5% of all high school wrestlers who wrestle in college. Those numbers are low compared to other sports. There are many reasons why these numbers do not correspond to football, basketball or lacrosse. Obviously, it is statistically challenging to compete at the college level in wrestling, so here are some critical factors that college coaches tend to focus on during the recruiting process.