In 2024 KSHSAA voted to add more games to the majority of sports seasons. Coaches and Athletic Directors were pleased with this outcome because the added games allow for teams and individuals to have more growth and opportunities.
“The state organization, KSHSAA (Kansas State High School Activities Association), voted in 2024 to add more games across most of our high school sports,” said Collin Mangus, Rose Hill High School Athletic Director. “The vote passed with input from Athletic Directors (AD’s) and Coaches…with the upsides being that student-athletes would benefit by offering more playing time, coaches would have more time to develop young players, and schools would have a better chance to maintain sub-varsity teams (by offering more games).”
A lot of back and forth goes into making and planning games for each sport. The schedules get sent to multiple athletic directors to get matchups for game days, and sometimes competition can even happen off court between schools trying to fill the same open dates.
“Our high school varsity schedules are first put together by various AD’s in our league, the AVCTL (Ark Valley Chisholm Trail League). For example, I create the baseball schedule…sending out the league matchups to other AD’s. Then, those AD’s add any non-league games that work with their schedule,” said Mangus. “There are always issues with schedule-making, as most schools are looking at the same open dates to fill. For us, that means that we play some teams that are farther away or in another classification (like we are 4A and sometimes play smaller or larger schools).”
Due to additional games multi-sport athletes will have less recovery times between their seasons. This also leads to additional work for the administration, they need to hire more people, set up for games which all takes time and money.
“Added games means our athletes will be doing more, so naturally they will need more time recovering. With our multi-sport athletes, that could possibly affect their next season…as they will not have as much recovery time as before,” said Mangus. “More games also means more prep work on the administration side. For each game, we need officials, workers, etc and that costs money.”
Additional games have many positive benefits like giving our athletes goals to look forward to every week, and giving them more practice to work on their skills.
“More games equals more opportunities. This could mean that more playing time allows our athletes to improve at their sport or that more games gives more students chances to get on the court/field/etc and participate. In reality, high school sports seasons can be pretty condensed as is, especially when it comes to skill development…so more games also equals more practices as well,” said Mangus. “In the end, more games should be a benefit to our athletes and programs. Although there will be some downsides, the upsides that go with more opportunities are hard to beat.”
