Freestyle is the way to go if the infrastructure was in place. As of right now, I think NY is the only state that has approved freestyle for high school girls. Because the growth of women's wrestling is from the top down, meaning olympic level wrestling spurned the growth, they are able to develop it the way they see best, with freestyle taking precedence over folkstyle. The big issue I see is that for a lot of states, there are not enough referees that understand the rules to adopt it quickly and if it does happen, it will take few years for states to educate their population. The way I see it spreading is at the grass roots level where the states around NY see the value and adopt it slowly from 1 to 5 to 10 states in the next few years. Once it hits critical mass and 20-25 states adopt it, the NFHS will see the writing on the wall and adopt it for all states.
The one confounding issue might be the liability. We see it in out society everywhere in that people are looking to sue everyone. A couple bad injuries and lawsuits and maybe it stalls the progress.
In terms of Washington's success, other states have already caught up and surpassed us. Washington was only the third state to sanction and HS state tournament for girls so we were very progressive. This led to a lot of success for Washington. If you look at the college lineup a lot of school, there are national champs and all-Americans on a lot of teams. With the east coast states now going all-in, there are now the toughest states. The traditionally tough boy's states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, NJ, and other midwest states are now better than Washington. With Wyoming Seminary and Blair academy and other private academies building girl's teams, look for the gap to widen. California is the exception because to populations so big. There are 313 high schools in Washington and we have 5 state champs, California has 1300 school with one state champ. They also have much larger schools so the effect is amplified.
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