Growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, which has a rich high school wrestling tradition, I love to follow the NCAA wrestling championships. Saturday night, in Philadelphia ten national champs were crown, which got me thinking about how many of those outstanding athletes played high school football?
I can’t tell you how many high school football coaches that have told me, they like to hit the wrestling room to find football players. One of them is former NFL offensive lineman David Alexander, who joined me on the High School Football America Podcast in 2019 to talk about the importance of multi-sport athletes.
“If you’re a wrestler, you go out in a singlet, you gotta go to the middle of the mat by yourself…there’s no place to hide,” said Alexander, who played 10-years in the NFL and led his alma mater Broken Arrow to an Oklahoma high school football championship in 2018. “There no better place, in my mind, to go compete.”
2025 NCAA champs Antrell Taylor of Nebraska and Stephen Buchanan of Iowa both had decent high school football careers.
Taylor, the 157-pound champ for the University of Nebraska, played scholastically at Millard South High School in Nebraska. He was a wide receiver, playing three years of varsity football for a program that went 27-5 between 2019 and 2021. He caught 60 balls, according to his MaxPreps stats, with ten of them for touchdowns. He also scored five rushing touchdowns during his high school career.
On the mat at Millard South, Taylor won three Nebraska Class A championships with a career record of 177-8.
Iowa 197-pound champ Stephen Buchanan also won his first NCAA crown Saturday night at the Wells Faro Center in Philly. Buchanan graduated from small Loyal High School in the middle part of Wisconsin.
Buchanan was a two-way starter as an all-conference player on the team’s offensive and defensive lines as a junior. He switched to running back as a senior and we still dominant on defensive, winning the Cloverwood Conference Defensive Player of the Year with 62 tackles and 11 sacks.
During his scholastic career, Buchanan won two Wisconsin wrestling championships. His career record was 184-16.
Penn State’s Mitchell Mesenbrink won the 165-pound NCAA championship. Like Buchanan, Mesenbrink played high school football at Arrowhead High in Wisconsin.
The highlight at the night was Oklahoma State’s Wyatt Hendrickson pulling what many are calling the biggest upset in NCAA wrestling history. Hendrickson upset two-time NCAA champ and 2020 Olympic gold medalist Gable Steveson for the 285-pound championship.
Hendrickson played football as a freshman at Newton High School in Kansas, but quickly concentrated on football after suffering several injuries on the gridiron.
