Fargo returned in 2021 in a big way. Literally the biggest way, in fact. 

After we all had to go an entire year with no Fargo, the siren call of the Fargodome lured in a record crop of America's best teenaged wrestlers.

Look at this graph for a far more efficient accounting of the participation numbers than any number of my words could provide. 

Solid year-over-year growth across the board. But what really got the numbers to jump this year -- nearly a 10% increase! -- was the junior men's freestylers. 

Below is an even more detailed breakdown, including age groups as well as styles. One other thing to keep in mind when reading these numbers is that the same person was counted multiple times if they entered more than one bracket. So the women who entered 16U and Juniors were counted tice, the men who entered freestyle and Greco were counted twice, etc.

The junior men's freestyle increase of nearly 25% stands out. That massive increase was evident to anyone who looked at the brackets and saw how many round-of-256 matches there were. 

And I wouldn't be too concerned about the lack of growth in the cadet range. We're still dealing with the reverberations from a lost year and most middle and high school seaons were 'unstructured', to put it mildly. 

We've got more numbers going back in Fargo history, so lets take a look at those too, why not?

And if that's not enough info for you then I have good news, Jason Bryant has collected even more in his spiffy Fargo Almanac, available here. 

That'll put a bow on our Fargo 2021 coverage. It was wonderful having that great event back. Here's to setting more records next year!