We've brought back the giant green rods, only this time instead of the hometowns of NCAA All-Amercians we're mapping the schools of the top high school wrestlers in the nation. 

Now that Willie has released his final update for the 2016-17 season, we can take the rankings, match the prep studs up to their high schools, and map where all the future NCAA stars are spending their formative years. 

We assigned points to all 20 wrestlers in all 14 weight classes on an inverse scale in relation to their ranks. So the No. 1-ranked wrestlers get 20 points, the No. 2 got 19, and so on. 

Armed with our new data, we are able to create the following high school wrestling map of the USA.



Unsurprisingly, it turned out similar to our map of the hometowns of the 2017 NCAA All-Americans. Also like our NCAA exercise, no ranked high schoolers hailed from Alaska, Hawaii, overseas territories, or foreign countries, so our map is contained to the contiguous United States.

Zooming in on our traditional hotbeds, we can why see the Northeast has proven to be one of the most fertile territories for college coaches out on the recruiting trail. 



Check out this video of  Blair's Chris Singletary and Wyoming Seminary's Nick Reenan from back in the 2016 National Prep finals. Those two prep school powerhouses are a big reason why you see so much green in the map above.



Another must-visit area for any coach looking for blue-chip talent is the near-Midwest. I'm not sure if that's a real place or if I just made it up, but regardless, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan are silly with talent. 



Traveling further west along the "wrestling belt," we arrive in the lakes and plains of Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, wherein lies an unquestionable bounty of high-caliber prospects. 



Last but certainly not least, we set our sights on the West Coast. Though not as densely packed with talent as its neighbors to the east, there is still a fount of Division I-ready wrestlers spouting from the Pacific states. 



Check out California's own No. 2-ranked Quentin Hovis taking out the No. 3-ranked Austin O'Connor in the 2016 Super 32 semifinal in the video below.



There are other lenses through which we can view our geographical concentrations of high school wrestling talent. Besides our towering jade monoliths, we can run our wrestlers, points, and locations through heat-mapping software and produce the map of the United States you see below.



Special shout out to Havre, Montana, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho! Parker Filius and Casey Randles representing the Northern Rockies, a true wrestling region that needs all the love it can get right now.