Twelve high schools have won about a third of every team state championship in Washington's modern history
Going back to the early 1970s, the WIAA has crowned thousands of team state champions across dozens of sports. Twelve schools account for roughly a third of them. One — Bellarmine Prep in Tacoma — has more than any public school in the state.
Published May 11, 2026athleticsWIAAhigh schoolsrankings
12 schools ≈ 1/3
Share of all WIAA team state championships held by the dozen winningest Washington high schools
The WIAA — the body that runs high-school sports in Washington — has been declaring team state champions across boys' and girls' sports since the early 1970s. Pull its championship records together and a familiar shape appears: a long tail of schools with one or two banners, and a short head of programs that win, and keep winning.
Most WIAA team state championships, all sports, ~1973-present (Washington high schools)
#
School
Area
Class
State titles*
1
Bellarmine Preparatory School
Tacoma
private (3A/4A)
~58
2
Mead High School
Spokane
4A
~49
3
Mercer Island High School
Mercer Island
3A
~39
4
Richland High School
Richland
4A
~30
5
Garfield High School
Seattle
3A
~29
6
Newport Senior High School
Bellevue
4A
~29
7
Sehome High School
Bellingham
2A
~25
8
Snohomish High School
Snohomish
3A
~24
9
Skyline High School
Sammamish
4A
~23
10
Ferris High School
Spokane
4A
~23
11
Lewis & Clark High School
Spokane
4A
~21
12
Moses Lake High School
Moses Lake
4A
~20
*Counts are de-duplicated from the WIAA's online championship archive (see methodology) and are approximate; treat them as ± a couple. They cover the team sports the WIAA exposes online, roughly 1973 to the present. Bellarmine Prep is the only private school in the top 25.
≈30%
Share of all WIAA team state titles held by just the top 10 schools (≈53% for the top 25)
It's a Puget Sound / Spokane story
Of the dozen winningest programs, three are in Spokane — Mead, Ferris, Lewis & Clark — and most of the rest ring Puget Sound: Tacoma, Mercer Island, Bellevue, Bellingham, Snohomish, Sammamish, with Richland and Moses Lake flying the flag for the Columbia Basin. Big enrollments, deep youth-sports pipelines, and long-tenured coaching staffs compound: Mead's distance-running program and Bellarmine's tennis and golf dynasties are the kind of thing that puts ten-plus banners on a single sport's wall.
Sports with the most state champions crowned (all schools, both genders)
Sport
Approx. champions in WIAA's online archive
Boys Track & Field
~93
Boys Basketball
~91
Boys Wrestling
~70
Boys Golf
~65
Boys Cross Country
~61
Boys Tennis
~58
Girls Gymnastics
~57
Girls Track & Field
~53
Halved from the raw archive counts; the ordering is robust to the exact factor. Track, basketball, and wrestling have the longest continuous championship histories and the most classifications, so they accumulate the most titles.
Short version of the count: we matched the WIAA's published championship pages to the schools in this atlas, halved the counts because the archive lists most finals twice, and rounded. The leaderboard is stable; the exact numbers are not. Full methodology below.
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Going back to the early '70s, 12 Washington high schools have won ~1 in 3 of every WIAA team state title. Top of the leaderboard: 1) Bellarmine Prep (Tacoma) 2) Mead (Spokane) 3) Mercer Island 4) Richland 5) Garfield 6) Newport (Bellevue)...
Source: WA K12 Academic Atlas · https://waschools.org/research/washington-high-school-sports-dynasties/
Methodology
Source is the WIAA's online TournChampsWL championship archive, scraped per sport, then matched by school name to the WA K12 Academic Atlas school list (with hand overrides for renamed or relocated schools and for paren-disambiguated names like "Newport (Bellevue)"). The pages we pulled list most championship finals twice — a boys/girls page split produces overlapping rows — so raw counts are consistently inflated by roughly 2×; the figures here halve the raw counts and round. We therefore present them as approximate and lean on the ranking and the concentration ratios, which don't depend on the exact multiplier. Coverage is the team sports the WIAA exposes online — roughly 1973 to the present for most sports; a few have shorter online histories. "State title" means a first-place team finish in a WIAA-sanctioned state championship in a given sport, classification, and year.
Sources
WIAA TournChampsWL championship archive (scraped per sport)
WA K12 Academic Atlas school directory (for name-matching)
These figures come from the WA K12 Academic Atlas — an interactive map of every K-12 school in Washington, assembled from twelve public data sources. Browse the map · see the rankings. Reporters: see the note on the research index.