When Ben Fallon was growing up in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, all he ever wanted to do was play football. Fallon was in fourth grade, and in Western Pennsylvania, pretty much every boy wants to play football. However, his parents had some strong feelings about that sport.

Wrestling was a sport in which he competed during middle school, high school and college. It was a passion for the sport he never really lost because, as he says, it shaped his character and his adult life.

When he and his wife, Corrine, got married and started having children, Fallon always believed he might find himself coaching a son. Except the son never came.

“I thought when my third daughter was born that wrestling was totally off the table for me,” he said. “I was kind of resigned to the fact that we were going to be a soccer family my whole life.”

And he was fine with that. However, that all changed last winter when his wife ran into the local club wrestling coach at Franklin Regional. He casually mentioned they were having “weigh-ins” if their girls wanted to join up.

“When Corrine told me, I didn’t even really give my kids an option,” he said. “I just said, ‘Hey, I have good news. We’re going to try wrestling this winter.’ So it wasn’t like something that I had been planning on doing with them because I didn’t even know we had a girls’ program.”

All three girls, 8, 5 and 3, came to the first weigh-in, wrestled and fell in love with it on their own, Fallon swears. Last weekend, they competed as part of the Franklin Regional Junior Wrestling Program in their first tournament.

The girls are not alone. While the sport of wrestling has long been a male-dominated field, it has experienced significant growth among girls in middle and high school over the past decade. College-level female wrestling has also seen a big boom, Fallon said.

“In fact, girls’ wrestling is now recognized as the fastest-growing high school sport in the United States, outpacing both football and basketball,” he said.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association sanctioned the first-ever girls’ state wrestling tournament, which was held concurrently with the annual boys’ state wrestling tournament at Hersheypark’s Giant Center.

Pennsylvania is not alone. There are 45 other states in the country that also hold state championship tournaments for girls.

At the college level, women are now competing, with the NCAA adding women’s wrestling as a championship sport.

Fallon said the popularity in his state has only intensified with people such as Sen. David McCormick (R-Pa.), who wrestled in high school and at the U.S. Military Academy, bringing President Donald Trump to Pennsylvania for the NCAA championship.

“What was great was not only seeing them there, but they stayed for the whole event, showing that what they were doing mattered,” Fallon said, adding that the high profile only adds to girls being interested.

“I also think it’s a combination of UFC getting really popular, and we see a lot of wrestlers who have become very successful,” he said. “McCormick is a senator, but you also have CEOs. There is just a lot of folks with a wrestling background, and I think it speaks to the hard work and dedication and ability to keep working through tough times. Girls are as attracted to that as much as boys.”