Another thing besides the population growth that contributed to the change of the numbers from 69/70 226,681 to 16/17 of 259,391 is the change in the number of schools that have teams. The same statistics show that there were only 6,870 schools that had teams in 69/70 so that is an average of almost 33 wrestlers per school in 69/70. Many schools did not have wrestling teams in 69/70. I know my school Rockhurst High School first year for a wrestling team was my senior year in the 68/69 season. I was looking at the 2014/2015 statistics and it showed a similar number of boy wrestlers 258,208 to the 16/17 number and the number of schools at a significant growth of teams at 10,597 which only makes for an average per school of little over 24, so that drop per team from 33 to 24 per team is a little over a 27% drop of wrestlers per team from 69/70 to 2014/2015. I did also notice that in the 1974 year there were 9,130 teams and 319,048 boy wrestlers at just under 35 wrestlers per team. I am not sure if that was the peak year for the number of boy wrestlers, but there has been a significant drop in both the number of high school boy wrestlers both in total numbers and average wrestlers per school team since 1974.